Tower and Town, October 2026 (view the full edition)A Good ReadMy book of the month is Matthew Sweet's The Great Dictator, a biography of Barbara Cartland - remember her? You have to be of a certain age to be aware of this producer of a record-breaking number of truly terrible but enormously popular books with ludicrous and tissue thin plots, a pedestrian and repetitive prose style and guaranteed swooningly happy endings. Costumed like a Frankenstein hybrid of the Queen Mother and Dolly Parton, Cartland was a seething mass of contradictions and an entirely self-aware, self-created phenomenon. The author was granted access and co-operation by her surviving family and has written a thorough and sympathetic account of his subject, taking her entirely seriously while acknowledging the frequent absurdities with nicely sardonic asides. Behind the candyfloss exterior was a will of iron, forged as she transcended the obstacles that the C20th threw at her. Born into what could be called the lower-upper classes, business failures and the death of her father in WW1 left Cartland and her mother ruthlessly determined to achieve social status and financial security. Marriage was the obvious route, but despite receiving (she claimed) 49 proposals, and marrying twice, a satisfactorily wealthy, titled and acquiescent husband proved elusive. Never mind - onward! Onward through divorce, war and the death of her beloved brother at Dunkirk, onward through opposition to her projects as a Conservative County Councillor (she secured a permanent site for Romany travellers), ever onward in the face of scathing reviews of her novels. Onward, promoting saccharine, ethereal romance, unsullied by the sordidly physical, while also, in an advice column, offering highly explicit advice on sex. She embodied the fluffiest form of femininity while being as commercially ruthless as any alpha-male industrialist. Fuelled by alarming quantities of vitamins, sustained by her belief in the occult, blithely immune to criticism or sympathy alike, she was, as Matthew Sweet perceptively shows, a product of her time, tempered by misfortune and tragedy into a woman one almost reluctantly finds admirable, however hard it is to warm to her. I have a couple of tiny quibbles about the production of this otherwise superb book, illustrations wrongly captioned, and at least one footnote mis-attributed. But I am of course a middle-class, “ham-faced” (fabulous insult!) dull little woman, thus insignificant and ineligible, alas, to be clasped in the strong arms of a handsome Duke and transported, trembling yet trusting, to roseate realms of pure love. Just enough space left to slip in a quick recommendation for Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, warm, comic, dense and mildly heart-breaking, I loved it. Debby Guest |