David Dimbleby - he's our Gentleman of the Year says Country Life

June 11, 2014, 8:34 am

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Glossy mag rates BBC broadcaster top gent for his 'steady hand in choppy waters', gravitas and beautifully toned voice

According to Country Life magazine, a true gentleman is always on time, makes love on his elbows and never wears fuchsia trousers all commandments David Dimbleby will have to abide by if he is to live up to his newest accolade.

The magazine has named the broadcaster Gentleman of the Year in its annual rankings, saying he is a man who "holds the nation steady when the waters get choppy".

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The top 10 books about style

April 9, 2015, 8:25 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper's Riders: why the toned-down cover?

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From Evelyn Waugh to Lauren Weisberger, the brilliant surfaces of these works show how intimately class and style are bound together

My new novel, Style, has turned out to be rather more topical than I had planned – which sometimes is the way with books (although the beastly reverse can also be true). The title is capable of meaning anything you want it to, really. It can convey a fervidly sought-after, though nebulous, charisma (which many of the worst affected yearn to somehow buy) … though of course my usage is heavily ironic. It can also mean, quite prosaically, simply the way people go about things: their everyday MO.

In Britain, though, “style” is almost as suspect a concept as “charm”: as so often, what we’re really talking about is “class”. I had long been considering writing a novel about the international obsession with celebrity and “must-have” status symbols, but held back because surely the mania couldn’t last. But no: it has powered along, steadily gaining momentum. The trigger arrived a few years ago when Brooklyn Beckham – son of David and Victoria – became, aged 10, a highly-paid model for Burberry. A couple of months ago, his brother Romeo followed suit, and because an unglimpsed child model forms the bedrock of my novel, this has maybe given it a bit of unexpected oomph.

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Jilly Cooper's Riders: why the toned-down cover?

June 3, 2015, 5:04 am

≫ Next: Our sexed-up culture is the reason for Jilly Cooper’s Riders makeover

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Small but ‘unsexy’ adjustment to the jacket art for a new edition of horsey bonkbuster has provoked a startlingly big fuss

There is a scandal going on in the world of books this week. And it’s not Philip Larkin’s distaste for literary parties, nor the depressing research showing that books about women are less likely to win literary prizes.

No. The Times, and the Daily Mail via the Times, inform us in no uncertain terms that the Issue of the Week is the slight change that has been made to the new cover of Jilly Cooper’s Riders.

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Our sexed-up culture is the reason for Jilly Cooper’s Riders makeover

June 10, 2015, 11:26 am

≫ Next: Reading taught me all about life

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper's Riders: why the toned-down cover?

What does the new cover for Jilly Cooper’s seminal bonkbuster say about sex in the 21st century? Does it reflect a new prudishness – or a growing obsession with spanking? In the anything-goes world of Fifty Shades of Grey and Miley Cyrus, plain old posh shagging needed a twist

Jilly Cooper’s seminal bonkbuster, Riders, has had a cover change: it’s pretty subtle, but they did it for a reason. In 1985, it featured a woman in jodphurs, holding a riding crop, with a guy’s hand inching toward her crack. The model, Jane Warner, recalled in the Daily Mail: “There was a lot of ‘where is the hand going to go?’ But it was done in a nice but naughty way.” For the 2015 version, the hand has been moved nearer the top of her arse; Louise Mensch described it as prudishness, while Marian Keyes said it was “more enlightened and more respectful and more responsible about women’s bodies”. They’re both wrong, but I mean that in a nice way. If you look at the image – what’s in this book, and why you might like it – the publishers are plainly intimating something. The hand still has meaning, right? It is no longer going anywhere, but it still has intention. The new position suggests authority and control more than plain sex. They’re clearly trying to say that it has spanking in it. In the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, they’d be mad not to.

In fact, there is almost no S&M to speak of in Riders (plus, the act of sex is pretty sketchily drawn. It’s not where you’d go for tips, put it that way.) Cooper’s main fetish is for posh. The sexual essence of her heroes is in their drawl and their rambling piles (houses, that is). Even the much-less-good-looking friends who surround the posh are irresistible to women, being also posh. The male characters who are not posh serve as a kind of niche perversion. Indeed, I’d argue that the whole bum-fingery subtext to the original image’s composition was a nod to the obsessions of the English upper class, and as such was a near-perfect signal of what the book was likely to be about.

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Reading taught me all about life

June 19, 2015, 10:29 pm

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper’s first lesbian sex scene? I can’t wait | Bridget Christie

≪ Previous: Our sexed-up culture is the reason for Jilly Cooper’s Riders makeover

Growing up in the 70s and 80s – a gentler, low-tech era – Eve Chase learned all about the adult world from books

Nature. Nurture. Novels. If you grew up pre-internet – we’re talking the 70s and 80s (“the olden days”, as my daughter calls it) – books brought you up, exerting as much influence on who you were and who you became as anything, or anyone. My school friends and I, some bookish, others not, all read ourselves into being and navigated our way through the wilds of childhood and adolescence with dog-eared novels as maps. There wasn’t much else to do. And you had to get your information from somewhere.

Parents – laissez-faire baby boomers (helicopter parenting hadn’t been invented) – weren’t particularly interested and, if asked, would usually send you off in the wrong direction, to the wrong book shelf, to something dusty – “Oh, I loved Vanity Fair at your age!” – not understanding our craving for fat books with silver-embossed covers, smelling of hormones and airports and America, page corners sticky from rereading, books that showed us dazzling new worlds – outside the suburb, beneath our skirts – and had all the best lines.

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Jilly Cooper’s first lesbian sex scene? I can’t wait | Bridget Christie

October 6, 2015, 12:00 pm

≫ Next: Will he need a leg-up? Jilly Cooper brings back racy Rupert in Mount!

≪ Previous: Reading taught me all about life

The bestselling author says she wants to write a lesbian romp, but is that really what her readers want? After all, lesbians don’t have sex in the same places straight women do, like around horses or money

Jilly Cooper OBE has just noticed lesbians. Talking to an audience at the Cheltenham literary festival, the 78-year-old bestselling author revealed that she “wouldn’t mind” writing her very first lesbian sex scene, and that she’d been thinking about writing passionate romps between women as “there seems to be a lot of it about now”.

I don’t know if there were any lesbians in the audience, or if they were asked whether they “minded” if Jilly Cooper OBE wrote one or not, or, indeed, if anyone pointed out to her that the earliest known mention of “it” in surviving historical documents is in the Code of Hammurabi, a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1754BC, and that there has probably been a lot of “it” about for around 200,000 years now, and where the hell had she been, but if Jilly Cooper OBE does decide to write about lesbian sex as realistically as she writes about heterosexual sex, it will be a blessed relief to lesbians all over the world, I’m quite sure of that.

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Will he need a leg-up? Jilly Cooper brings back racy Rupert in Mount!

February 29, 2016, 6:31 am

≫ Next: Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper’s first lesbian sex scene? I can’t wait | Bridget Christie

The novelist’s new book reintroduces the notorious Rupert Campbell-Black, older but hopefully no wiser, and promises ‘lots of human nookie’

Jilly Cooper has promised there will be “lots of human nookie” in her new novel Mount!, which is due out this autumn.

Cooper’s publisher Transworld said that Mount! would be set “in the glamorous and fiercely competitive world of flat racing”, and that Cooper’s dashingly handsome former playboy Rupert Campbell-Black would once again be “centre-stage”. Campbell-Black was the star of Cooper’s first “bonkbuster”, Riders, and found love in her second, Rivals, with the raven-haired Taggie. Although he has played a large part in her other novels, and has gone on to have a family with Taggie, he has not been the centre of a novel since.

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Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

March 5, 2016, 4:05 pm

≫ Next: Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

≪ Previous: Will he need a leg-up? Jilly Cooper brings back racy Rupert in Mount!

Exhibition of celebrity female to-do lists, from Jilly Cooper to Cherie Booth, offers insight into busy 21st-century lives

Few “to-do” lists include “call Jason Donovan, buy secret Santa gifts and then write to Melinda Gates” but these were all in a day’s work for Emma Freud. The writer and campaigner is among female celebrities and performers who have revealed their lists for a London exhibition dedicated to the cult of the “to-do” list, which opens on International Women’s Day on 8 March.

The show, called The Pram in the Hall, created by artist Alice Instone, reveals that Emilia Fox needed to tidy her bedroom and then learn her lines for Silent Witness, while Sadie Frost had to brainstorm a new line of bikinis while preparing tea for her children. Human rights activist Shami Chakrabarti had to buy a Christmas tree and then re-read the counter-terrorism bill.

There were admissions at the school gate of adding completed tasks to make ourselves feel better!

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Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

March 25, 2016, 4:57 am

≫ Next: London – the view from outside

≪ Previous: Save the world, then ice a cake: how women have to juggle life, work and art

The worthy titles people display at home are often unread, while private passions – from Dan Brown to Christian Grey – are shuffled swiftly off to Oxfam

“I could never get rid of a book,” plenty of people say, when what they really mean is: “I could never get rid of a book that makes me look clever.” Middle-class bookshelves are as carefully curated as any art exhibition, crafted to reflect us in the best possible light; a hint of the intellectual (Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, Foucault’s Pendulum), a bit of modern award-winning literature (A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Song of Achilles) and a few stylish, lighter pieces to show we know the difference between a classic and a casual beach read (Where’d You Go, Bernadette, How to Build a Girl). All so that when visitors cast an eye over the shelves, we can say: “Have you read it? I really enjoyed it, actually,” without embarrassment, indicating the golden door-stop of Bring Up the Bodies, or the slim elegance of the adoringly reviewed We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

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London – the view from outside

April 24, 2016, 2:30 am

≫ Next: Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

≪ Previous: Fifty shades of shame (or why you won’t find the books I read on my shelves) | Flic Everett

How does London appear to those who do not live there? Culturally vibrant, exciting and diverse? Overpriced, polluted and self-important? On the eve of the mayoral elections, we ask cultural figures who now live elsewhere to speak some home truths to the capital…

Poet and writer, Lincolnshire

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Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

June 8, 2016, 5:13 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties and asking us to bed’

≪ Previous: London – the view from outside

Her publisher controversially cleaned up last year’s reissue of Riders. Will readers keep their cool over the 50-Shadesian packaging of her new book?

The talk on the books desk this morning has strayed away from the imminent revelation of the winner of the Baileys prize to Rupert Campbell-Black’s jodhpurs, following the revelation of the cover for Jilly Cooper’s forthcoming new novel, Mount! (The exclamation mark is the author’s.)

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Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties and asking us to bed’

September 10, 2016, 4:01 am

≫ Next: Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

≪ Previous: Battle for the bulge: Jilly Cooper's Mount! is no return to saucy covers

The doyenne of the bonkbuster talks about her latest doorstopper, her marriage and the days before political correctness

“I think,” says Jilly Cooper, managing to seem both nervous and delighted, “that people are going to be very cross.” The doyenne, as one writer put it, of “sweaty horseflesh, adulterous bonking and beautiful people with posh voices” is talking about a significant development that occurs towards the end of her latest brick of a novel, the breathlessly named Mount!, published this month by Bantam.

For the first time since 1988’s Rivals, her blond-haired, blue-eyed toff Rupert Campbell-Black has a starring role in the story, rather than a bit part, and Cooper has created some rather unexpected plotlines for the man she variously describes as “Mecca for most women” and “as bloody-minded as he is beautiful”. It’s not quite Game of Thrones, but “it was very shocking”, she says, of this particular twist, almost as if it swooped in to the novel of its own accord.

You can’t say anything now. Not that one wants to say people are fat, but mind you, they are huge, aren’t they?

I always liked those hunky, rather forceful men

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Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

September 15, 2016, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper: ‘People were always coming up to us at parties and asking us to bed’

A whirlwind of parties, hairdos and horses hails the return of one of fiction’s most lusted-after characters

There is a single word, about three quarters of the way through this book, spoken at the heights of ecstasy by a 59-year-old man to a 30-year-old woman, that is so appalling, so extraordinary and so unutterably Jilly Cooper you can’t imagine anyone on the receiving end of it not immediately dissolving in horrified laughter, kicking the offender out of bed, and calling the OED.

Unless, of course, the man in question was Rupert Campbell-Black.

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Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

April 7, 2017, 4:59 am

≫ Next: Can you match the house to the writer it inspired? – quiz

≪ Previous: Mount! by Jilly Cooper review – daft, boozy joy

The novelist talks about her pride in her father, her mother – who taught her to read at four – and how writing novels saved her from loneliness after the death of her husband

My father, Bill, was very, very shy, but he was divine. And very clever: he got a first in two years at Cambridge University and then became the youngest brigadier in the army, which made me burst with pride. He and I used to play Beethoven piano duets.

After the war, he ran English Electric and then became managing director of an engineering firm in Bradford. One day, the board of directors asked him to tell the chairman he was too old and ought to step down. When he plucked up the courage to do so, the old man flipped his lid, called in the other directors and said, “Bill’s tried to throw me out.” Not one of them spoke up for Daddy. He was fired by lunchtime, which meant we lost our beautiful house. So shocking! So perfidious!

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Can you match the house to the writer it inspired? – quiz

August 9, 2017, 10:15 pm

≫ Next: Jilly Cooper: modern men have beards and cry all the time

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper: ‘My books are my babies’

The residence that helped Stephen King conceive a horror classic has gone on sale in the US. We have some other properties for you to view …

Which children’s novel featuring talking animals was inspired by this property?

The Sheep-Pig by Dick King-Smith

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson

Charlotte’s Web by EB White

Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl

Whose tales of amorous country life often feature a fictionalised version of her own home?

Jilly Cooper

Barbara Cartland

Jenny Colgan

Katie Fforde

This hut inspired the verse of which poet?

Philip Larkin

Dylan Thomas

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Purple Ronnie

Which classic children’s novel was inspired by this stately home in Kent?

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Peter Pan by JM Barrie

Five Children and It by E Nesbit

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Which speculative fiction master lived in this sunny California home?

Philip K Dick

Ray Bradbury

Kurt Vonnegut

HP Lovecraft

Who is currently writing their memoir in this purpose-built 'luxury hut'?

Brad Pitt

Nigel Farage

David Cameron

Philip Roth

Which of Stephen King’s horror novels was inspired by, and indeed written in, this Maine house?

Pet Sematary

Misery

Carrie

Salem’s Lot

Which dystopian classic was imagined here?

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

World War Z by Max Brooks

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Which of Enid Blyton’s series were set in and around her home here?

The Secret Seven

The Famous Five

Noddy

The Mystery series

Which reclusive author retreated here?

Thomas Pynchon

JK Rowling

Harper Lee

JD Salinger

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Jilly Cooper: modern men have beards and cry all the time

May 31, 2018, 11:46 am

≫ Next: Katharine Whitehorn: This is how you changed our view of the world

≪ Previous: Can you match the house to the writer it inspired? – quiz

Author tells Hay festival of phenomenon of ‘married men wanting to have gay affairs’

Jilly Cooper, the doyenne of the posh bonkbuster, has given her observations on modern men: they cry too much, always have a beard and are perhaps so scared of women they seek relationships with men.

In a lively talk at the Hay literary festival on Thursday, Cooper, mostly with her tongue in her cheek, spoke about sex, horses, football, gender fluidity and Germaine Greer, who had appeared at Hay the previous day.

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Katharine Whitehorn: This is how you changed our view of the world

June 2, 2018, 4:05 pm

≫ Next: Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

≪ Previous: Jilly Cooper: modern men have beards and cry all the time

It was revealed last week that the veteran Observer journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, now aged 90, has advanced Alzheimer’s. Four women – three writers and a reader – tell how her radical brand of journalism was a catalyst for a new way of thinking

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Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

June 3, 2018, 1:30 am

≫ Next: If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

≪ Previous: Katharine Whitehorn: This is how you changed our view of the world

With her views on rape, Germaine Greer has torpedoed the chance for women of all generations to find common cause

How can older women, even fiendishly brainy, internationally celebrated feminist academics, expect respect from, in particular, younger women, if they spout embarrassing, offensive, outdated claptrap?

Many will have heard by now of Germaine Greer’s remarks about rape at the Hay literary festival, turning what could have been a worthwhile discussion – about the legal complexities of consent, and strategies for more successful conviction – into an inglorious display of shock-jock showboating.

With feminism having a charged moment, there’s an opportunity for generations of women to come together

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If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

June 13, 2018, 8:58 am

≫ Next: A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

≪ Previous: Germaine, your shock-jock musings just alienate today’s young feminists | Barbara Ellen

Jilly Cooper hasn’t been away for 22 years because she can’t bear to leave her greyhound – but every day is like a holiday when there’s a dog in your life

Jilly Cooper says she hasn’t had a holiday in 22 years because she would miss her dog too much. “It’s ridiculous, but I can’t bear to leave Bluebell,” she said, adding that it helps that she lives somewhere lovely. “Gloucestershire is so beautiful in the summer, I don’t want to go away.”

I live in the bucolic surroundings of a big city, soothed by the dulcet natural tones of car horns and sirens, so I quite like going away whenever possible, but having a dog does make it more difficult, for practical as well as sentimental reasons. The main way of dealing with the missing-them part is to take them with you. This is less easy for Cooper, who has a greyhound, too gangly to be truly portable, but manageable for me, with a little whippet, and a fondness for the kind of walking-based breaks beloved of retirees and BBC Four presenters.

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A new start: Jilly Cooper on the night in a Kama Sutra room that led to her book Riders

January 1, 2019, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Over 40 and loving it: let's celebrate fiction with positive older characters

≪ Previous: If having a dog means you can never have another holiday, is it worth it?

While struggling to write the novel that would transform her career, she discovered the country pile that would prove inspirational

Being a very horsey little girl, I always dreamed about writing a novel about show jumping, but I didn’t get down to it until I was in my 30s, in 1972, when my publisher gave me an advance and my husband, Leo, and I moved to Putney in London. Ten years later, shamefully, I had made little progress, finding it difficult to describe the changing seasons in London and having only riding school horses to interview.

Then, in May 1982, Leo, I and our two mongrels, Mabel and Barbara, were invited to Longleat for the weekend. Our host, Alexander Thynn, the Marquess of Bath, was an adventurous artist and we were excited to find ourselves sleeping in the Kama Sutra room. This had a rhino horn sticking out of the bedhead of a large four-poster, a mirror on the ceiling and numerous couples in different sexual positions painted around the walls.

This story of change was published in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December

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