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Q&A: Jilly Cooper

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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My favourite smell? 24 Faubourg, by Hermès

Jilly Cooper was born in Essex in 1937 and brought up in Yorkshire. Her writing career began in 1956 as a cub reporter on the Middlesex Independent, and she went on to become a national newspaper columnist. Her first book, How To Stay Married, appeared in 1969. In 1985, her novel Riders was an instant bestseller, a success repeated in 1993 with The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. Her new novel is Jump!

When were you happiest?
Tomorrow. I travel hopefully.

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Why I love Jilly Cooper

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Jump!, the latest novel from Jilly Cooper, is, for at least one fan, another glorious romp full of horses, drunken heroines and villainous men

Booker prize shortlist? Whatevs. This month has been a red-letter one in my diary for way more significant literary reasons. On Thursday, Jump!, Jilly Cooper's latest novel, was published. I have already read 300 pages. Considering this is London fashion week, and as the Guardian's fashion editor I was working all weekend, this tells you something about my devotion to Jilly, who with Jump! "returns to horses with a romp through the world of jump racing".

I don't really give a toss about horses, to be honest, and, apart from my soft spot for Cooper, I read proper novels, not 700-page bonkbusters with cleavage shots on the cover. Nonetheless, she is one of my all-time heroines and something new from her is, to me, an absolute treat.

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Jilly Cooper honoured for 'services to horseracing'

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Eclipse Cup recognises author's contribution in her novels to promoting the 'terrific fun' to be had at the races

From the Cheltenham Gold Cup to the Grand National, horseracing trophies pepper the pages of Jilly Cooper's latest romp. Now, the bestselling author has been awarded a cup of her own for "services to the social side of racing".

Horseracing magazine Eclipse was inspired to create the Eclipse Cup award by Cooper's new bestseller, the jauntily titled Jump! which follows the adventures of beautiful widow Etta Bancroft and her motley racing syndicate as they enter their horse, Mrs Wilkinson, in races around the country. The magazine hopes the novel will help encourage more people to attend horse races: around 75% of race-goers only attend once a year.

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Books of the year

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns(Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.

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The Guardian Review literary quiz

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Test your literary knowledge with a fiendish set of questions from our panel of writers including Iain Banks, Jilly Cooper, David Hare, Nick Hornby, Lorrie Moore and Will Self.

Readers with the highest scores will go into a draw for a set of five of the most nominated Books of the Year. Please send your answers to books.competition@guardian.co.ukbefore midnight this Friday, 17 December, as the answers will be printed in Saturday's Review. For the full terms and conditions, click here

Iain Banks
1 "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." So begins Chapter 82 of which novel?
2 In Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, identical copies of which book provide the code Wormold uses to communicate with his bosses in the British secret service?
3 Which AI is also known as The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above his Head, and in which novel, by whom?

John Banville
1 Who was the shadow of the waxwing slain?
2 What is the paltry nude starting on?
3 Where did Caligula encounter the Czar?

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Jilly Cooper: 'I'm a reasonable writer but I'm much too colloquial'

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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The author talks about growing old, sex and a goat called Chisholm

You've previously admitted that writing your latest novel, Jump!, was "a nightmare". Why was it so difficult?

Because I'm much slower now. In fact I can hardly remember what I've written on the last page, so I'm always rereading just to remind myself. And it's difficult because Leo was ill [Cooper's husband of 50 years has Parkinson's disease] and I didn't get much sleep. It's so difficult to explain but it's a full-time thing, even with carers. I just think I got slower. And I broke my wrist while I was writing it. And my finger. Feather, my greyhound, took off when I was walking him on the lead.

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Oh Jilly Cooper, please don't give up the sex

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Novelist threatens to abandon the sex-near-horses genre to write a proper book

Jilly Cooper says she now finds it "difficult" to write sex scenes, even though she used to bash them out with the joyous snuffling of a Laura-Ashley-yellow Labrador finding a chocolate button under a sofa. In fact, Cooper may abandon the sex-near-horses genre entirely, and try to impersonate Margaret Drabble instead. "I'd like to write a good book, a proper good book," she says, being entirely ignorant of my opinion that her murder-mystery Score! is a masterpiece. What is this? How can a woman who once compared an orgasm to the machinations of a washing machine abandon us to the sexless wastelands of more literary writers, when the experience of reading them is like watching Ian McEwan doing a handstand?

Could the memory of a passage from Riders, Cooper's other masterpiece, remind her of what she has lost and what may come again? This scene features the psychotic show-jumper Rupert Campbell-Black, who is based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, copulating with Amanda Hamilton, the wife of the foreign secretary. So, if you are very literal, you are about to imagine Andrew Parker Bowles and Ffion Hague in bed.

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The best holiday reads

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Anna Karenina on the beach, The Corrections in Patagonia, Death in Venice overlooking the Lido ... Writers recall their most memorable holiday reads what are yours?

John Banville

I came late to Henry James. In my teenage years I read some of the stories and The Turn of the Screw, but I did not approach the novels until the early 1970s when, on holiday in Florence, I took up The Portrait of a Lady in a well-thumbed Modern Library edition. I had not realised that so much of the book was set in and around Florence, or that James had written the first instalments in the Hôtel de l'Arno, just around the corner from the pensione where I was staying, near Santa Croce.

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The Review Christmas quiz

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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From snail-smuggling to hair-cuts, our fiendish quiz tests your literary knowledge plus who said what in 2011

Find all the answers here

1. Who thought to cry out to the angelic orders?

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Magazine they said would never last celebrates its 20th anniversary

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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The Oldie is 20 years old. The magazine launched amid considerable scepticism about its chances of publishing more than a couple of issues has survived and thrived.

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Why women love Fifty Shades of Grey

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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It's the fastest-selling novel for adults of all time and it's very adult in content. Why have millions of women been seduced by Fifty Shades of Grey, asks Zoe Williams

It's pointless to deny that there's something going on here: EL James has now sold 4 million copies of her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy via her UK publisher, Random House, to add to the 15 million (it beggars belief) that have been shifted in the US and Canada. In three months. In the UK, it's the fastest-selling book ever in both physical and ebook incarnations. There's just been an extra print run for the UK market, to meet demand: 2.75 million copies. It's the fastest selling adult novel of all time. By which they mean "it's the fastest-selling novel of all time that isn't Harry Potter". But its content is, of course, rather adult.

The trilogy features Anastasia Steele, who falls in love with Christian Grey, a troubled young billionaire who likes sex only if he can accompany it with quite formal, stylised corporal punishment. The narrative drivers are pretty slack improbable dialogue ("I'm a very wealthy man, Miss Steele, and I have expensive and absorbing hobbies"); lame characterisation; irritating tics (a constant war between Steele's "subconscious", which is always fainting or putting on half-moon glasses, and her "inner goddess", who is forever pouting and stamping); and an internal monologue that goes like this "Holy hell, he's hot!"; "No man has ever affected me the way Christian Grey has, and I cannot fathom why. Is it his looks? His civility? Wealth? Power?" Yuh huh. Civility puts me in a blue funk too.

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Best literary sex scenes: writers' favourites

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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In the wake of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, we asked authors to tell us who does sex best in fiction

Alan Hollinghurst does sex rather well, but most of the writers who do it best don't "do" it at all, but simply allow it to happen in a way that can easily be supplied by any reader who happens to have done it.

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Sex in the suburbs: a history of the bonkbuster in six books

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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From kings' mistresses to lusty housewives and rutting polo players, there's wicked entertainment between the covers

Preposterously long (962 pages) and very naughty, Forever Amber is set in Restoration London, land of pox and periwigs. Amber St Clare, a beautiful country girl, loses her virginity to a nobleman, Lord Carlton, and goes to London as his mistress. When he departs overseas, she marries a physically hideous conman to avoid her baby being branded a bastard. Thrown into debtors' prison at Newgate, she escapes with the help of a highwayman. There follows a string of lovers until she marries an earl and, eventually, becomes the mistress of Charles II. Kathleen Winsor's book caused much outrage; it was banned in Boston and burned on the streets. But it sold 100,000 copies in its first week and can justifiably lay claim to being, in bonkbuster terms, the mother of them all.

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Maeve Binchy: a big-hearted guide to friendship, love and loss

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Authors from Anne Rice to Ian Rankin are lining up to mourn the death of Maeve Binchy on Twitter, and I agree: the world has lost one of its warmest writers

Sad news arrived late on Monday night. The Irish author Maeve Binchy, with whom I whiled away my teenage nights, following her into the heartache and hard times and eventual happiness of many a character, has died, and the world of books has lost one of its warmest, most generous writers.

Tributes are pouring in on Twitter and elsewhere from fellow authors: Ian Rankin called her "a huge presence ... a writer whose warmth extended beyond words", and "a gregarious, larger than life, ebullient recorder of human foibles and wonderment". "We've lost another beloved writer," tweeted Anne Rice. "She was a darling, I am very, very very sad," said Jilly Cooper, describing Binchy as "so kind and so funny and so captivating she was just a brilliant, brilliant writer".

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Why Jilly Cooper should not let racy Rupert grow old disgracefully

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Leading Sire will be Cooper's next racing romp. But do we want to see the beautiful bounder who first appeared in Riders nearly 30 years ago turned into a skirt-chasing octogenarian?

I have spoken before of my love for Jilly Cooper she is such a hero of mine that, when she phoned my previous place of work to speak to a colleague and I spoke to her just to put her through to a colleague, my hands were practically trembling; my palms damp, in best Taggie O'Hara style. So despite my disappointment that Jump! didn't match up to her finest (Rivals, Riders, Polo, if you're interested perhaps it was the exclamation mark that turned me off Jump!, Score! and Wicked!), there's still a part of me which is (in Cooper idiom) in heaven at the news that she's currently embroiled in researching her new novel, which will be set in the world of flat racing.

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Why Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina transcends the ages

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Five writers give their personal takes on the appeal that makes Anna Karenina a literary masterpiece

Anna Karenina is probably my favourite novel. More than any other book, it persuades me that there is such a thing as human nature, and that some part of that nature remains fundamentally unaffected by history and culture. I try to re-read it every few years. Each time, perhaps because I'm older and have experienced more, I find things I never noticed before. Not only is it a great source of pleasure, but I inevitably feel as if I'm getting a sort of pep talk from Tolstoy: Go deeper. Try harder. Aim higher. Pay closer attention to the world. It's orchestral, symphonic, full of distinctive melodies, parallels and variations that keep reappearing, some of which we notice, none of which we need to notice in order for them to operate on our subconscious. There are so many virtuosic set pieces (the skating party, the ball, the mushroom-picking expedition, and, my God, the race during which Vronsky breaks his horse's neck) but also small, powerful, resonant moments: I've always loved the scene in which Anna, having met the charming Vronksy, returns home to her husband and is struck by how unattractive his ears are. How could something like that not stand up to, and transcend, the so-called test of time?

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Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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We challenged well-known writers from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper to come up with a story of up to 140 characters. This is their stab at Twitter fiction

I know I said that if I lived to 100 I'd not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.

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Media Monkey's Diary: Jilly Cooper, Lord Patten and Emilia Fox

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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When tributes were paid last week to Sir Harold Evans as he picked up the Media Society's lifetime achievement award, the most memorable contribution came from Jilly Cooper, a Sunday Times columnist before she became a novelist. Cooper recalled that "the darling man" stood by her despite the raunchiness of her writing ("we wrote so much about sex in those days", she said, that the pre-Wapping paper could have been renamed "50 Shades of Gray's Inn Road"), even when a bishop reported her to the Press Council for a piece about the best cars for shagging in. However, he did censor Cooper once, when an article on a hen night described a stripper "whipping off a blue towel, and rotating his member at great speed like an English setter's tail". This was "not suitable for a family paper", the great challenger of censorship primly decreed.

Connoisseurs of Lord Patten's appearances before various parliamentary committees had thin pickings in last week's gig at the culture select committee, which offered few opportunities for his usual sly witticisms about his inquisitors (and sometimes his colleagues). And in the one satisfying spiky exchange, he failed to defeat his nemesis, the Tory MP Philip Davies. The combative Davies, who clearly shares the Daily Mail's blue-tinted view of the corporation, was questioning Tony Hall when Patten tried to intervene. Davies told him "he lost the right to ask questions when he [Patten] lost his safe seat in Bath", to which Patten's reply sulky rather than silken was that the Bath seat "was never safe". An attempted recovery, asking Davies if he had "read the report" (by the BBC Trust on a programme about welfare issues), only elicited the disappointing response that indeed he had.

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Leo Cooper obituary

March 27, 2014, 10:48 am
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Publisher of military history books and husband of Jilly Cooper

Leo Cooper, who has died aged 79 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was a publisher with a zeal for military history, who also enjoyed some notoriety as the husband of the novelist Jilly Cooper.

Leo's hospitality was out of all proportion to the size of his establishment. Every day, for 20-odd years, he kept open house at his "branch office", the Oporto pub in London's Covent Garden, where the company might include anyone from a general to a dustman. You might not have Leo to yourself for more than a minute or two he really did do a lot of business at the bar but you could always be sure of a drink.

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Insomnia and me: Jilly Cooper

April 18, 2014, 4:01 pm
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'The only thing worse than not sleeping is rereading something I have written in the day and it making me go to sleep'

Are you an insomniac? Share your experiences

I've never been a brilliant sleeper, but since my darling husband Leo died last November I've only managed to grab three or four hours' sleep most nights. Losing him was such an overwhelming thing to happen, and now, without him, I feel like I have such a very big bed. Of course I miss him terribly, but I am doing OK. I wouldn't want people to think I wasn't.

Luckily my beloved greyhounds are keen to fill the bed space. They're always rushing into the bedroom through the night to try to clamber on to the bed first. There follows a stand-off when one of them manages it, as the others then won't climb on. While the dogs often whine, which can be annoying, it's nice to have someone to talk to.

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