Just here for the fizz and the snacks (with Matthew Sweet)

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2:13Right, we are on. So I just want to be more like Eve, which is why I've contrived to get a cold that has made my voice sink a little bit. I'm trying to affect the Eve Salisbury Tam and it's still not as good. But this cold has done a journey, hasn't it? You think? I think patient zero was Jane. Yeah. And I got it. Me and Jane had about a week overlap where her cough was ending and my cough was beginning. And I think you and I have got that same overlap about three weeks later. Right, and my cough. so the huge problem is and I do apologize we'll be able to stop the podcast if I have a little bit of a coughing fit yes but it's a very big day in politics today Andy Burnham's making his first speech to his first Labour Party conference as leader with the slogan hope again and it probably is going to be the first time that we really get a bit of flesh on the bones of what the party is going to do under him.

3:17It is not a day to come off the back of that in a terrible kind of Victorian coughing fit. So we've got a presenter's friend coming to hold my hand at three o 'clock. I feel like such a ninny. But it's one of those things, if I was doing any other job, you wouldn't really know. Well, I was going to say it's, yeah, you can't avoid talking and that is really what gets the tickle going. It does, doesn't it? It's so annoying. So I've got all my strepsils as well, but nobody wants to hear somebody sucking a lozenge on the radio. That's proper, proper torture, isn't it? Ryan's going to have to be hot on your mic today.

4:00Anyway, apologies all round, and I'll never sound as good as you. It's just a fact. So I have given you, with your beautiful voice, all of the really difficult pronunciations to read out today. Oh, perfect. Thank you. Because we've had fantastic book recommendations from people who are so informative about what young men are reading and also what's being targeted to young men. So I think we will definitely, definitely pick one of the selection on offer to read as a book club. And we're just going to have to settle ourselves down, aren't we? Take a big deep breath and go, I'm a young man reading this.

4:40yeah there was someone in the inbox which is completely fair enough who basically said it's not really how i want to spend my time trying to get inside the head of a young man that's absolutely fine but i also don't think that's to say that what young men are reading is not it's not going to be of interest to us either yeah can only be read by young men i think you're completely right because then at the same time we would be saying that all of the books that we absolutely love why would young men bother to read them and a book is the only place that you can truly step in somebody else's experience firsthand wear their shoes walk their walk feel their feelings so it's got to go both ways hasn't it and and i just know that i have never read a book uh that is completely beloved of young men you know i didn't i know that i didn't read that kind of book when I was a young woman.

5:36I mean, in the 1990s, we, you know, chick lit just erupted over the bookshelves. Started by Bridget Jones Diary. And I did certainly read an awful lot of that. I didn't feel the need to get inside a young man's head in the way that I definitely could benefit from now. And some of those suggestions sound really interesting. Do you want to do some of them? Yes. And I'm sorry about the pronunciations, but you're just much better at this type of thing than me. Let's see how this goes. This comes from Francis. Dear Jane, Fee and Young Eve, I was interested in your discussion of choices for the Off-Air Book Club and your curiosity relating to what young men read these days.

6:13My son has always been a keen reader. I'm not sure what he was reading at university. Probably quite a few books on civil engineering, but he always seemed to have something on the go during Christmas or summer holidays. I'm a keen reader myself and I'm still a member of a book group I joined when my daughter was in primary school. I was tickled pink when he told me that he and four of his friends had formed a book group. So far, they've read three books. The first, Long Live the Post Horn by Vigdus Horth. Perfect. You've really done me in here. You've really nailed it there, Eve. Absolutely wonderful.

6:47Spot on. Yes. Second, The Word for World is Forest, a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Yeah, equally good. yeah i know i'm just gonna be stitched up like this very cruel i've got to cough and the third wimmy road boys by safai and salam i've no idea what any of them are but ethan said they're all interesting in their own way also no idea if this is what the average 31 year old is reading at the moment but it could be a good starting point in your research for the next book love the pod and have been listening for years. Well, how heartening is that? Yes. Book clubs of their own volition.

7:30I'd never heard of any of those books either, but we will do a little bit of digging and definitely, definitely pop them in the pile. This is Erica from Nottingham who says, I asked my 23-year-old son for a suggestion for the book club and he has written the following for me to send to you. So here we go. My favourite book is Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It's an older Japanese novel that I and several other young men I know have read and found uniquely relatable and deeply moving. It follows a man in his 20th year grappling with purpose, sexuality and grief in a way that focuses less on morality and more on how both the smallest and largest experiences in life shape you.

8:09It definitely feels like the target audience is young men, but it's also a book I really struggle to recommend to most people. Paradoxically, it's a book which so well reflects the way the world can feel and be as a young man, including all of the grit and grime that makes it really hard to share in fear of exposing the illusion that men put up. It's not a dramatic book, but it's one that has been very powerful and meaningful to myself and my best friend. And there is nothing else I've read which has better shone a light on my own life. Wow. Yes, wow. So that tickled my fancy as well. Have you read Norwegian Wood?

8:44So I haven't read it either, but probably about eight, nine years ago, I was on a holiday and one of the dads on the family holiday pressed it into my hand and said, you really should read this. I think at that age, I just, I couldn't, I didn't really get into it. I'm intrigued by it, but I think it was quite popular, wasn't it? Which is... I definitely recognise the title. Yep. So that just sounds fantastic. What a recommendation as well from your 23-year-old son. So, Erica, you are definitely in there quite close to the top of the pile. What we always do is just make sure that any of these books aren't going to sink us in your cancelled way, that they are available in all bookshops, libraries and secondhand places as well.

9:32And we are absolutely aware of the fact that hardbacks are a no-no, but that one's not going to be a hardback, so we'll be OK. So we'll do a little bit of research on that and come back to you with the final title. next week. We also need to run it past Jane to make sure it's something that she will read, although it's never worked before. She don't want to read it. She don't read it. There's always one in book club who just turns up and says, I couldn't be arsed. And then book club needs one. The fizz and the snacks. Exactly, exactly. Somebody who just kind of views it from afar. I'm also so heartened just to hear people turning to the sons and friends and partners in their lives and getting these recommendations and having those conversations it's such a nice thing it is lovely isn't it because sometimes you think that people would be embarrassed to say that they listen to this podcast but they're not they are they're reaching out no but i'm with you because um you know how how crazy if we don't ask things of other people to better inform us about our own lives and that's the problem isn't it that we're all just so stuck in our own bloody echo chambers, especially in terms of the generations and genders.

10:43We're not crossing over at all and we just need to, absolutely need to. The Canadian postie uniform coming to you from Greece comes from Echo. Echo has a PS. I am a woman, I wrote him once before and you weren't quite sure. So I popped that up at the top, here we go. I'm listening to the latest podcast in one of Jane's most visited places. So that would either be... Liverpool. Or... Probably the little bakery section around the corner from her. Or... Greece. Greece. Greece. However, not one of the islands, but the beautiful mainland of the Peloponnese, staying with my mother, who has a house halfway up a cliff in the village of Virga, just outside of Kalamata.

11:28Well, don't hold back on the invitations. Eve and I can still manage the stairs, so we'll be delighted to have an invitation. We've both been very ill. We need a little bit of a break. And Eve hasn't been away for a week. When I'm not in Greece helping my mother get rid of rats and organising, fixing, leaking roofs with interludes and swimming in the middle. Actually, it doesn't sound very nice, does it? Maybe we won't go. And filling my face with the best food and wine. I'm wearing a uniform delivering the mail in Ottawa, Canada. I'm very happy to wear a uniform. Never have to think about what to wear and best of all, my work pays for my clothes.

12:01It also means clothes last much longer because they're hardly worn. When I'm not at work and I'm going to be leaving the house, I do put a lot of effort into what to wear. And as an expat Brit living in Canada, on and off for the last 30 years, I do still think that en masse, Canadians don't really dress to leave the house. I didn't know this about the Canadians. Leisure wear is a thing, Echo tells us. Definitely not my thing, but I do love my uniform for work. I still have another week here in the sunshine. Let's hope there are fewer village rats and more swims and late lunches under the olive groves well very much so so i would have thought that canadians were super smart well i think it's quite a phenomenon now with the rise of athleisure i have a friend who recently moved to sydney and they're very into their fitness there aren't they they get up really early and there's run clubs and sea swims and all sorts she loved it when she first moved there but after a while she was like i just missed putting jeans on because all of her friends in their social circles would just wear leggings and lululemon out because that's just what their whole social lives revolve around yeah i mean it's a lovely life well i mean it's yes it's a lovely life they're lovely outfits they don't really suit very many people there's a certain body shape that does not look good in lululemon just gently raising my hand no it's it's very true and i would i wouldn't be able to do that if i like a hard trouser you've really nailed your kind of it's not formal but your kind of workwear wardrobe have i i don't i'm i'm not sure i have but it's nice of you to say that i just as i was saying before now we visualize i just have to know the type of thing i'm wearing every day because otherwise i get in a bit of a panic in the morning and i just can't work out what's going to look nice from the waist up do you pick your outfit the night before i do do you lay it out i hang it up yes i do and and i know that this will tickle the fancies of our lovely listeners but i bought a new iron at the weekend eve because my previous one kept on tripping the fuse very annoying uh so i invested in a 45 pound 99 uh phillips ultra steam that just it just had so much stuff on it that it claimed to be able to do it can travel to different planets all by itself.

14:24It can superpower a crease beyond oblivion. It could probably do the household finances. I mean, it's a bells and whistles thing, but bloody hell, I've never had so much fun on a Sunday evening. As I did this. It's looking very crisp. Well, I've got these silly shirts that just take, they take so much specificity in the ironing department, but I did love it. That was a boring diversion. We're back with Joe. I just wanted to put one out there to the hive. My partner was on a short... Now, this is terrible, Eve. My partner was on a short flight from Dublin to London last week, and she happened to get a business class seat.

15:00She was the only woman in the cabin and had a man sitting next to her. She put her headphones in to watch a series and tucked into her chicken salad. Everyone else was asleep. About halfway through the flight, the man sitting next door to her elbowed her so hard, it brought tears to her eyes. she was so shocked and afraid she just sat there unable to react when the plane landed he disembarked without making eye contact on the one hand she's wishing she'd said or done something and on the other hand very relieved she didn't make a scene at the same time wondering if she had imagined it she's 57 and the man next to her was considerably younger i know this happens to women daily and in all walks of life but perhaps if we had an idea of how to react in this situations it may empower us kind regards joe and so i'm assuming that your partner felt that this was a very deliberate act so it wasn't somebody getting comfortable in their seat and accidentally whacking her she felt it was a man very much on purpose sharply elbowing her and then ignoring the fact that he had done that i find those outbursts of uh male aggression so frightening because most of us are lucky in our daily life not to be encountering that when something does break through that meniscus is absolutely horrible and so horrible in a public place and you're right how do we react to that it's half the the act in itself and then it's also the sheer shock of having that that almost like that fourth wall of society kind of broken through where someone's completely violated you.

16:39I had an interaction with a line bike. Well, I didn't, I didn't have the interaction with the line bike. I was on the line bike. I had an interaction with a man who was in a car. We kind of intercepted each other. I thought he was going too fast. But he then actually proceeded to get out of the car and essentially like find me on the line and just started shouting at me. It was only a short encounter and it was just a few minutes from the day. But it really, it felt so violating i was just so taken aback and it was the shock more than the actual act it sets you off on a bad foot the rest of the day no completely completely and you're right it's because it just goes against the grain of how we are all living most of the time and to be on the receiving end of male aggression i think it just it it changes it changes you especially this type of aggression where it's just coming absolutely out of nowhere and she can't escape it she's sat on a flight with him and i wonder whether um this this younger man absolutely knew that he could do it because you were on a plane and there were lots of other people around i mean he obviously wasn't afraid of any repercussions or consequences and it's that horrible physical jerk in somebody isn't it where they they lose control of themselves is a very frightening frightening thing to be around so i've got no answers to that joe i mean i i i do rather wish that your partner had at least reported it to one of the stewards and just said you know this has happened to me just so she could leave a tiny bit of it in the place where it happened because that's so weird as well you know to to have to just get off the plane guy doesn't look at you you just have to go through your duty free and your passport control as if nothing's happened and actually something did happen.

18:29I mean, both Eve and I would completely recognise, you know, there are many forms of male violence and this isn't the very worst of it. There are women who are listening who are probably shouting back at us saying, well, you know, you should know half of the stuff that's happened to me. We completely and utterly accept that. So if anybody does have any suggestions, I think we do have to call it out more, but I think in the moment it's very difficult. What I would be interested is to know, how can you almost like reset your nervous system after something like that happened? yeah I don't know whether you can I mean I think that's I think that's why uh violence changes you you know it just makes you hypersensitive it increases your cortisol means next time you see somebody approaching you when you're on a line bite you probably will think is this going to happen again I mean I think it's just it is a an absolutely terrifying thing but it's so frustrating isn't it that so many men are just getting away with it in public now and we do you're absolutely right Joe's right you're right we we need to find a better kind of language to deal with it.

19:28We'll definitely take your suggestions. Uniforms, red ants. Would you like some red ant news? Please. Do you get a bit creepy crawly? Do you get a bit worried about those things? No, I really don't actually. Okay. Do you? Yes. Well, I'm off to this. I'm going to call you Kate. Your conversation about uniforms this week struck a chord. I used to work in international humanitarian mind clearance. and we got all sorts listening to this podcast and that is remarkable work and as such wore a uniform daily this consisted of practical trousers and a shirt worn under body armor topped off with a visor and helmet to protect from blast and fragmentation as you can imagine this get-up was rather warm particularly given that temperatures in the countries i worked in were often 35 degrees plus in the shade with over 85 percent humidity i could easily drink four litres of water in morning without needing the loo once.

20:24I vividly remember one early morning. We started at dawn to beat the worst of the heat, accidentally bumping a red ant's nest in a tree with my metal detector. The entire colony instantly dropped onto my head and ran down inside my body armour. What followed was the very rapid processing of a tricky situation. You see, everybody's itching now. How to rid myself of hundreds of stinging little blighters without accidentally leaping into an uncleared minefield. Oh my gosh. We'd certainly not covered this. In training, I rapidly retreated to safe ground where I stripped off my body armour and shirt in record time, much to the complete bemusement of my lovely local all-male colleagues and all before 6am.

21:02Well, if anybody was struggling today on the Circle Line, that's put it into context, hasn't it? It really has. That would be quite something, Kate. Gives you the shivers. Yes. Let's not dwell on it too much. Who's our guest today, Eve? Our guest is Matthew Sweet, and he's written a biography about Barbara Cartland that you've said is just the most fun. It is superb. It is called The Great Dictator because she was so prolific in her lifetime. And one of the ways that she managed to be so prolific was she dictated all of her novels. There was one year where she wrote 20 novels. So she would have a team of secretaries.

21:42She would lie on the sofa, sometimes in the bath or definitely in a shears long. and she would just speak and the secretaries would take it in turn to have novels dictated to them and she was the biggest female biggest selling female author of all time in her lifetime uh only ever dim by agatha christie and in her lifetime up against jackie collins uh they had a bit of a set to on wogan which i think you can still access uh somewhere on youtube which i will do in my private time this weekend. Matthew Sweet's biography of Dame Barbara Cartland is superb. It is so funny. And also because it spans nearly 100 years, takes you through the war, the debutante seasons, all through the miners' strike, the politics of Thatcherism.

22:37Some incredible things about Barbara Cartland come out. I didn't know that she'd campaigned for as rights i didn't know that she was a politician herself it's a really amazing story i just couldn't recommend it highly enough so matthew sweet is our guest and i did meet barbara cartler once because we were doing this silly show on glr and we had lots and lots of different sections in it and one of them was a guide to life and we'd pick a different well-known person every month and we'd go and ask them about how they lived their life and to hand out nuggets of wisdom and there are all kinds of people who we asked and I don't know why we hit on Barbara Cartland but anyway I wrote a letter to Dame Barbara Cartland posted it off to her house it was well known where she lived this beautiful country park called Canfield expecting to hear nothing from her and got a letter back from her son who was also her manager and agent saying yes do come along for lunch and bring your tape recorder so I trotted up there this would be about 1994 in in the VW polo with my ewer and recorded Barbara Cartland's Guide to Life I remember it being a little bit saucier than I was thinking it would be there's quite a lot of advice to the lady of the house of how to stay satisfied with all areas of housekeeping let's just leave it there and she was so funny her appearance which we will talk about in the interview with Matthew Sweet was very distracting so even by the mid-1990s she had a very powdered makeup thing going down her hair was boofed beyond boof and she did have this kind of DIY facelift which other people had seen as well which was basically she just put a piece of gaffer tape on one side of her jaw pulled it round the back of her neck and affixed it to the other side of her jaw and it works but it's also quite strange and it was quite distracting all of that but we had a lovely lunch it was one of the few times in my life where I've been incredibly grateful to my mother for the almost absurd level of cutlery control we had as kids because it was one of those kind of lunches eve where you know you pass the salt the wrong way what was her crockery like it was a very fine bone china good question but she was delightful to me she was she was very polite she was very hospitable she was actually quite interested in uh in me there would be no reason why she should have been uh and what do you just what a person to have met i've still got the tapes somewhere but they're in the fireproof box in the attic along with a little clip of emma forbes saying sniff my hair well that's a story for another day so Matthew Sweet has got even better stories which actually go somewhere as well and so we will commend this interview to you

25:41your heart can tell you a lot about your health Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most advanced heart rate sensing in an Apple Watch so your vitals app now with heart rate variability could tell you when something is off and your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. For general wellness purposes only, not intended for clinical use or to detect, diagnose, monitor or treat medical conditions. Requires iPhone 11 or later. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough.

26:14It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments. but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends.

26:58You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Losing weight can feel like a roller coaster, full of ups, downs, and being thrown for loops, like when someone brings donuts into the office, or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again.

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28:10Shall we put a date then on when we would like suggestions for the book club to be in by Eve? Should we aim for the end of next week? And then do you think this will be the book that takes us through till Christmas? I think it has to be. Yeah, I think it probably will be at this rate. Because we don't want to put anything on somebody's list in December. Everyone gets very busy. So yeah, that only really leaves October and November to get through it. So yeah, should we say the end of next week? Yeah, okay. And hopefully Jane will be here and we shall gather. Absolutely. But I tell you what, why don't we send her the suggestion so far and she can have a little gander when she's sitting around with Ray because I think there is quite a lot of sitting around at the moment.

28:52So Jane and Fia at Times.Radio remains our email address. thank you for all of your lovely emails it is me and Eve yeah I've got that right haven't I? I did that yesterday and I wasn't sure if I did it right yes because I would normally say it's me yes this week you wouldn't say I we will have made Patricia very very happy there I'm not sure Patricia's still listening anyway that's the email address I think we did but that's the marvellous thing about a podcast you don't have to listen to it you can just go off and find something else or all those boys talking politics many many many boys are talking politics or you can stay with us and just roll with it here's Matthew Sweet Matthew Sweet what a delight to talk about the great dictator a life of Barbara Cartland I think it's just a superb biography it's so detailed I learned so much new stuff about Babs and all of the way through, I just thought, but why?

29:52What was it about her that you thought I'm going to devote a not inconsiderable amount of time of my own life to finding out more? Because she's a totally compelling character. She thrums with main character energy. You can sort of argue with her, but if you ever listen to like any archive of a journalist attempting to interview her, It is rather like watching somebody being run over by a bus driven by a duchess during the general strike, probably. But she is just so she's a profoundly compelling figure. And I also had access to all of her private papers, which meant that I kind of see beyond the image that she presented very successfully to the world.

30:37So when we think of Barbara Cartland, we think of what she looked like. We will talk about that in a moment. I think most people would be able to tell you that she wrote romance and that she wrote a lot. But actually, there is so much more to this woman than that. Tell us a little bit about the access that you were given that allowed you to find out so many things. Well, when Barbara died, she left this document saying that she wanted her house, Canfield Place in Hertfordshire, to be open to the public. She even decided how much the tickets were going to cost. This is very typical behaviour. and which rooms the public should be allowed access to.

31:16Now, that never happened, but her son took this decree as it was in the spirit in which it was issued. And so the house has remained a kind of time capsule. Now, Ian McCorkadale, her son, very sadly died in 2023, and I'd been talking to him about using her papers, but his death meant that I think things became a little more relaxed and his daughter Tara said, just come on over. We'll see. Let's have a chat about it. And by the end of that day, really, she'd very kindly, very generously, essentially given me the run of the house where nothing has changed. So I was literally opening cupboards, blowing the cobwebs and the dust off, type scripts and letters and all kinds of documents, horoscopes, the letters that she wrote to the man who did her boiler, making sure that he got some smoked salmon every Christmas.

32:12You know, she kept absolutely everything. Her bottles of Tippex are still in the Bureau drawer. She is remarkable. Let's do some figures about her before we talk about her life. Yeah. So tell us about the big numbers, how much she sold, how long she lived for, things like this, but also what she died with, because I found that very surprising. Her life is essentially the whole of the 20th century. You know, born in 1901, dies in 2000. She wrote 723 books, most of which are romantic fiction. In her lifetime, she sold, we think, 750 million books, possibly a billion. the Guinness Book of Records records a lot of the data on this so that in her really purple period, when she's really productive in the 70s and 80s, she is sometimes writing 25 novels a year.

33:10She could do 8 ,000 words a day. 8 ,000 words a day, yeah. But the title of the book alludes to how she could do that. Well, indeed, she barely touched a typewriter in her life. Very early on, she writes her fiction in longhand. But quite soon, she decides that in order to really, it's a kind of efficiency idea, really. She realizes that she can dictate six to eight thousand words a day. So she develops this routine whereby, you know, nine o 'clock in the morning, she has scrambled eggs in bed. Then she walks the dogs. Then she does her correspondence because she received about 30 ,000 letters a year from not just from readers, but from people who wanted her advice on all kinds of rather intimate questions.

33:55She had an advice column with a rather threatening title. All I want to do is help you. and then she had a lunch about 12 15 nice lunch you know often if you if you if you have a happen to have a copy of barbacottland's health food cookery book you will see the kind of dishes on offer double cream featured very heavily she also took a lot of vitamins she took about she claimed to take 90 vitamin pills a day and she tried everything really and all kinds of odd and strange things, some of which contained human placental tissue, injections of vitamins as well. So she was kind of powered by this and she sold them too.

34:37It's why she got the elbow from her job as agony aunt at the oldie because she was, you know, it turned into a bit of an advert. So after lunch, then the dictation begins and really the 8 ,000 words are done by 4.30 in the afternoon. The figure that I referred to at the end of her life, which really surprised me, was actually the very small amount of money she left. As you've said, maybe a billion books were sold. I was imagining that she would leave a fortune, you know, that rivals Mark Zuckerberg, but it wasn't that for her at all. No, after all the debts were settled, there was literally nothing, you know, clicked down to zero.

35:14Her Norman Hartnell frocks were really the only assets that she seemed to have. But I think that's because she did that thing that a lot of writers did and do of making sure her copyrights were held by a company, by Barbara Cartland Promotions, rather than her personally. So it was all done with a separate company. Something imaginative, I think, in the finances. And also she didn't really, she didn't earn massive advances like Jackie Collins, for instance, because she wrote so much. If you're writing a novel every fortnight, then it's much more like being a working journalist, really, and feeding this machine rather than being the blockbuster novelist who produces, you know, one big thing a year, perhaps.

36:00How many of her books have you read? About 270. Oh, Matthew. And I see no reason to stop. You know, I carry one with me usually. Do you like them? Yeah, I do. And also, they're so rich a source for a biographer, and I find it quite hard in a way to separate that out from what I feel when I read them because of the way she wrote. You know, she lies on the sofa. She looks into the middle distance. She speaks fiction. And then a secretary who is very much out of her eyeline sits and writes it all down and isn't allowed to sneeze or cough or breathe too loudly. But what pours out of her often are her own experiences.

36:44So she constantly visits and revisits the traumas and difficulties in her own family history. So you can see the things that really, you know, those turning points in her life. She's always processing into fiction over and over and over again. So tell us about some of those themes. There was a suicide in her family that, as with every suicide, it has reverberations for generations. In a way, you can explain the whole of Barbara Cartland's life through the impact of this bullet in 1903 that her grandfather put into his head, standing in a field in Edgbaston. It didn't ruin the family. He wasn't committing suicide, I don't think, because the family finances had been absolutely destroyed.

37:29They were brass manufacturers. That was where the money came from. But it meant that Barbara's bit of the family was rather cut out of the settlement that happened after the grandfather's suicide because Barbara's father, Bertie, was a bit of a gambler, a bit of a waster, tended to spend, lose money at the racetrack. So he had this allowance. But it basically meant that her bit of the family lived in shabby gentility for really the first 20 years or so of the 20th century. And really, Barbara is all about recuperating that fortune, getting back what she called park gates, this idea of a house that had a driveway.

38:12So that was really the impelling thing of her life, to reverse the misfortune that that suicide brought. You say that Barbara Cartland came of age in a world depleted of men. Yeah. So this was the time when so many young men had died in the war. Just as Barbara was kind of getting into dating and going out with boys, the war was ending. So she had to pick a husband from this generation of shell-shocked, literally and metaphorically, men. Many of whom, I think, many of the people who were kind of in a position to take her out were also men who had a kind of survivor's guilt. because they were the ones who came back.

38:58Their brothers and fathers had died and they perhaps had found themselves now the heads of families, also perhaps the inheritors of wealth. And it meant that the dating pool consisted of these traumatised men. I mean, Barbara received a lot of proposals. 49, she claimed. The number wobbles about over time, but she eventually decided on 49. and two of those she received at gunpoint. You know, this was a reckless generation that she's a brilliant observer of, actually. You can go to her for a very strong and convincing first-hand account of just how screwed up these men were. A lot of them die in car crashes and plane crashes and, you know, doing reckless things.

39:48They were careless of their lives, I think. Yes, and that really comes across in the book. I mean, there is barely a page where something extraordinary doesn't happen to one of the characters in her life. We do need to talk about her attitude to sex as well, and that is connected to that generation of men. I mean, she had this theory that if men were damaged in war, they became much better lovers. Yes. Her idea was that if you'd let a bit of yourself behind at the Battle of the Somme, for instance, then your blood had less far to travel around the body. So her second husband, Hugh, was very lucky to survive Passchendaele.

40:31He had a gaping hole in him all his life. And he came back in a terrible state. He wasn't expected to live. And Barbara said that this made him a better lover. And she also said of the wartime cabinet minister, Duncan Sandys, that his virility improved after he got his foot crushed by a tank. Right. Every cloud. We should talk about the men who proposed. I mean, what was it about her that made her so charming to men? Not every girl on the debutante scene would have been getting 49 proposals. She wasn't the most beautiful. She wasn't the wealthiest. What was she? I think that she was rather persuasive, actually.

41:14She wasn't a confident woman, I don't think. She was rather nervous of many of her lovers. And I think the idea of physical love did alarm her. You know, when she learned the facts of life, she absolutely recoiled from them. And I think if things got really serious, the possibility of something physical happen often scared her. So in a way, all those proposals are, they're not like a way of documenting her promiscuity, certainly, because she refused to allow a boy to kiss her unless he had proposed. So that's why that number is so high. So in a way, it's sort of evidence for the opposite of what it appears to be.

41:58She kind of kept men at bay and she broke off engagements, actually. And once her first real proper engagement was broken off, there was a sort of relief, I think, in a way. Sometimes she was scared by when men came on to her. And some of the men were just ridiculous, Matthew. There's this guy, Jimmy Dunn. I'm going to read you what you write about Jimmy Dunn. Jimmy Dunn had a dining room full of sickerts, a family, a villa in Capferrat and a decree absolute in the post, but Barbara was probably right to reject him. She would have found life as Lady Dunn intolerable. He threw things when he lost his temper.

42:36He kept his rooms cold and declined to turn on the heating in his private plane. He refused to use an electric razor, believing that beard clippings were carcinogenic. He feared to be left in a room alone. During his evening bathing exercises, he would sing Oh God Our Help in Ages Past and expect the household to stand to attention. After which, he would brush his teeth with table salt and require his wife to read aloud until he fell asleep, at which point three bells would ring gently to remind his staff to remain quiet. When he woke in the morning, an all clear was sounded. See, Babs would never have talked with that.

43:08Yeah, but he was a rich industrialist, a big figure of the period, Sir James Dunn. What happened was that she went with him, Brabo went with him for a weekend in France and turned down a proposal for him. He ended up going off with her chaperone, the best friend she'd brought along. So she was part, things like this. And then his son proposed to her on the way home. Keeping in the family. Yeah. She married unsuccessfully, I mean, unhappily. Yeah, very unhappily. And divorced and then married much more happily, the cousin of her first husband. Yes, it's a curious one that, isn't it? The first honeymoon she had was very, very miserable.

43:52And the marriage was, I think, a bit doomed from the start. It wasn't consummated for a very long time. Barbara was, I think, very physically self-conscious. And she was often rather ill. You know, she had like ulcers and abscesses and stuff like that. The kind of thing that might not make you want to, you know, to snog somebody's face off. and her first husband was a man who she thought, Alexander McCorkadale, he was called Saki for short, and she thought that he was like a kind of taciturn man with hidden depths and he turned out not to have the hidden depths. But this is why when she was asked about her makeup, her famous mascara, she would reveal that this wasn't mascara at all if she was asked, and she was rarely asked.

44:44Journalists often found it hard to get a follow-up question in, but often they were incurious about it, I think. And so this isn't mascara that you see on her eyelashes. It's Meltonian shoe cream. And she started to wear this on her first honeymoon because she discovered that it didn't run when you cried. And so she stuck to it all her life as a kind of defence mechanism, really. That first marriage was very, very unhappy. And then, you know, by this kind of strange turn of fate, it's Saki's cousin Hugh, who she marries in the late 30s. We need to talk about the books. I mean, they are extraordinary.

45:24She was also a prolific writer of opinion columns, diaries. I mean, the woman just wrote. The plots are so delightful to read about, and I admire you for having done 270 of them. I just want to read you this one. The third, The Forgotten City, was a landmark. This is a trilogy she wrote. An experiment never to be repeated. Barbara's relationship with Ronald provided the emotional energy. We'll talk about her brother in a sec. The cliffhanger serial element vanished. The heroine Pamela runs away from her wedding after reading a spiritual epic poem by her brother whose whereabouts is unknown. Iron's book had awakened her.

46:04She was like a woman who responds to the passion of a lover. She was like a martyr who understands the true ecstasy of death and welcomes it with open arms. She sets out on a spiritual quest across the world, dallies with a German anti-Nazi, and finally in Tunis, sets out into the desert with a Buddhist novice called Bruce, with whom it seems she is going to find romantic and religious consummation. It doesn't happen. Pamela leaves Bruce behind in a Tibetan monastery that has rather improbably appeared in the Sahara and gallops out across the sand. Yes. I mean, this is part of the course, really.

46:38Sometimes, I think in later years, when she very much fixed on the idea of writing Regency romances, that's the kind of story we associate with her. Those plots calm down slightly. But, you know, I was reading one the other day, No Time for Love, written in the early 70s. And this begins with the heroine leaving her mother, who's just died in a sanatorium in Switzerland, coming home to London, being told by a doctor that she has got this disease, which means that she has exactly 21 days to live. And she's fallen in love with a boy who's been in the sanatorium, too, who she writes a letter to. He's gone back to the States, but he's dead now too.

47:21But the family thing that her letter sent to him is an attempt to blackmail him. So they send his brother over to take her to Sorrento, where, of course, they fall in love and eat lots of things over many, many chapters. It's really just an account of a holiday she had, I think. So she never really lost this capacity for these kind of exuberant, freewheeling, oh, where shall I go next kind of plots. And, of course, the readers absolutely lapped it up. Yeah, yeah. She was one of those writers who was so fiercely successful in terms of her numbers, but the accolades of the literary establishment really, they were elusive to her.

48:01Did she mind that? She was ridiculed by people in her lifetime, wasn't she? She, I think, accepted that there was a sort of Faustian arrangement that she'd made in courting this image, constructing this image. you know the one that we probably have in our heads of the pink frocks and the uh you know the the the blonde foamy hair and the the dog and the tape for a facelift that's in later years yeah she just rather than having plastic surgery she just used to kind of tape her head up and sometimes it would come it would come unstuck during interviews she covered it up with powder the other thing to say about that is that she began to lose her sight very early.

48:42So some aspects of her rather extraordinary appearance are to do with the idea of not really being able to see herself in the mirror very clearly, I think. But no, she was hurt by the things that people wrote about her. And she did say that her and she and her daughter Rain would sometimes get together and read the cuttings and weep. But I think she recognised that there was a trade-off there. And that although So she was very fond of two books of hers, her biography of her brother, Ronald, and a novel called Sleeping Swords because they were the ones that were best reviewed. So critical opinion did matter to her.

49:19But usually she wasn't even reviewed as a writer. She was kind of considered as a kind of symptom of something. And this is what I wanted to try and do in the book, write about her as a novelist and not as a sort of, as a kind of caricature, A caricature, but also of like evidence of something going badly wrong in culture. You know, a diagnosis of something. It's worth spending a moment on her brother because their relationship was extraordinary, wasn't it? Ronnie was a Tory MP, very courageous man. One of the anti-appeasement Tories who gathered around Churchill. He died at Dunkirk. He was gay.

49:59And this wasn't a secret within the family. one of the amazing things that I didn't find it, the housekeeper at Canfield Place, Debbie Mitchell, who became my co-researcher on this book, found Ronnie's letters in a zip-up suitcase at the back of a wardrobe. And he wrote very, very frank letters to his mother, to her and to he and Barbara's mother, Polly, about his romantic and sexual life. And they had, around the time of Barbara's divorce developed this very, very close relationship. They were both interested in a lot of the same things, kind of politically and spiritually and philosophically.

50:38She used to talk about it as a kind of spiritual marriage. And she imagined herself and Ronald living sort of in other dimensions. And maybe the idea that they might have had different relationships in the past or would have different relationships in the future, either as lovers or as father and daughter, something like that. They thought of their souls as being connected in some very deep kind of way. I learned so many other things about Barbara Cartland. I mean, I'll freely confess, Matthew, that my opinion of her was so shaped by her appearance. It was shaped by that caricature of the woman lying on a chaise longue, dictating stories about virgins.

51:20You know, it didn't call to me as a child of the 1970s, a young woman in the 90s, but actually she had real gumption and political belief. Yeah. She stood up for women in difficulty, particularly around pregnancy, I felt. Yes, yeah. She was always very willing to help a young pregnant woman in trouble. Or brides who didn't have enough money for their dresses. During the war she was a welfare officer, a tiny voluntary position, And she set up this bank library of white wedding dresses because she knew just by going around the bases and talking to women, service women, she knew that they didn't want to get married in their uniforms.

52:07They wanted a white wedding dress. So she collected hundreds of them. And, you know, they could take them and then they sent them back after they got married. But she was always up to schemes like that. And though she certainly wasn't a feminist, we can call her an anti-feminist, I think. She didn't seem to really like women, which is a very odd thing having just heard those stories about her kindness. She didn't enjoy the company of women, did she? No, she's extraordinary paradoxical like this because you can't quite put her in a box politically. She's very interested in ways of exercising female power that don't fit into the model of feminism.

52:49And I think she wrote for women who felt themselves, you know, outside of the arguments of feminism, really, who weren't kind of in the movement and didn't really sign up to it. And there were enough of those, although we don't really think of them, do we? Particularly when we think of the of the changes of the last few years, there were enough of those to give her a large body of readers. But like she is, you know, she was like, for instance, advocating that women should be paid for domestic work, which is sort of what like Italian Marxists were arguing in the 1970s. And yet she's obsessed with the idea of virginity.

53:23She comes to that later. And also early, the very early 60s, she's writing sex advice manuals with very clear and explicit advice about about orgasms and, you know, what to do in bed. And, you know, she comes up with formulations like there are no cold women, only fumbling husbands. So she's very hard to categorise like this. And it's an absolutely brilliant book because of that. I just learnt, so it does what a good biography should do. It takes you to a place that you're familiar with because you've bought a book about a person you're interested in. And then it takes you to completely unfamiliar territory.

54:02So it's a hard, hard recommend from me. Thank you very much indeed, Matthew. Matthew Sweet and his superb biography of Dame Barbara Cartland is called, and this is one of the best titles of all time, The Great Dictator. Do you get it? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Of course you do, because you're not a stupid girl. I like it. Yeah. And it's a gorgeous cover as well. It's a lovely cover. Really, really lovely cover. And it's just so, it's so readable and it's got some great, great payoff lines in it too. So hard, hard recommend from me. Lovely gift, actually. I think if you're looking for something for somebody at Christmas who really enjoys their social history, you really don't have to read it, you know, because you're a fan of Barbara Cartland.

54:46But as a travel through the last century, last hundred years in this country, it's just amazing. So Eve and I are back on Thursday. Yes. Yes. And on Thursday, God, it's another cracking literary guest. yes it's leanne moriarty who flew in all the way from australia just to do the interview now is your nose growing a little bit there eve and we're so honored yeah we cut you what we she's the one author we cannot get away with saying that about because she actually does listen to the podcast sorry leanne so leanne i'm very sorry about that eve's just getting ideas above her station it's only a matter of time so yeah terrific guest we'll speak on Thursday.

55:33I'm fine. Goodbye.

55:53Congratulations. You've staggered somehow to the end of another Off Air with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live every day, Monday to Thursday, 2 till 4 on Times Radio. The jeopardy is off the scale. And if you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. So you can get the radio online on DAB or on the free Times Radio app. Off Air is produced by Eve Salisbury and the executive producer is Rosie Cutler.

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