Matthew Sweet's new biography, The Great Dictator, offers a serious and compassionate portrait of Barbara Cartland, the phenomenally prolific romantic novelist who dictated her books aloud to secretaries while reclining with a pekingese on her lap. Rather than mocking Cartland as a lazy joke or camp figure, as some previous accounts have done, Sweet treats her as a genuine cultural phenomenon whose life spanned almost the entire 20th century, drawing on unfettered access to her letters, scrapbooks and typescripts at her Hertfordshire home, Camfield Place.

Cartland wrote 723 novels, producing up to 8,000 words a day and 23 books a year at her peak, with lifetime sales of 750 million topped only by Agatha Christie and Shakespeare. Born in 1901 to a Birmingham trade family and Gloucestershire gentry mother, she was shaped early by loss, including her father's death in the first world war, and went on to become fiercely self-sufficient, first as a Fleet Street gossip columnist chronicling a Bright Young Things generation still traumatised by war, before building her extraordinary literary empire and exerting an iron will over everyone and everything around her, from husbands to the local council.