It was Graham Greene who inadvertently launched Barbara Taylor Bradford, who has died aged 91, on the road that would lead, in 2003, to her induction into the Writers Hall of Fame of America, alongside Mark Twain, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Character is plot, he had explained in an article – and suddenly Bradford understood what fiction was really about.
It was the mid-1970s, and BTB, as she came to be known, was already a successful journalist, with more than a dozen columns syndicated throughout the US. But as an author she had succeeded only with books on decorating and design, having abandoned several attempts at a novel. “If I hated them, then the reader would hate them,” she acknowledged.
