Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the perfectly outrageous biography of Barbara Cartland, the Queen of Romance. The Tablet Barbara Cartland wrote 723 books and sold millions of copies of them without ever touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap - and romantic fiction billowed out of her.

This dazzling biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara - a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril. Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made.