Tackle!: Let the sabotage and scandals begin in the new instant Sunday Times bestseller

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The series is being written by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who was an executive producer on A Very English Scandal and EastEnders, and Olivier award winner Laura Wade, and who wrote the screenplay for the film The Riot Club. I just read a marvellous novel called Why Mummy Drinks at Christmas by Gill Sims. Caragh Bell is a beautiful writer. I love Jojo Moyes and Helen Fielding. I often revisit classics too. I’m rereading Anthony Powell and Proust. What readers might notice slightly less of though, is the actual sex. It's still in there, but somewhat tamer than her earlier books (even though she says her publishers pushed her to include more). Cooper has said she finds it "quite difficult" to write sex scenes now. Treadwell-Collins said Cooper’s “iconic novels’ razor-sharp observations on class, sex, love and what it means to be British resonate even more today than when Jilly wrote them in the 1980s”.

Being loved and a job where people say “well done!”. It’s terribly trivial but it matters. I’ve always said the secret to a happy marriage is creaking bed springs – from laughter, rather than sex. Not much. Disney want me to keep my trap shut. But I’ve seen the first episodes and it’s wonderful. Sure, there is a load of sex in every Cooper novel, but it’s told quite elliptically. These are no Fifty Shades, put it that way. When she won an OBE for services to literature in 2004, there was a lot of sniggering, mainly centred on the idea of the queen reading a book that had someone’s hand down someone else’s trousers on the cover. There was also an amount of mirth around whether or not all this counted as literature. The novel features a gay relationship between a player and manager. How do you feel about homosexuality still being taboo in football? Gosh no! For a start, I live in rural Gloucestershire, so I don’t meet my noisy mates any more. People who every time they open their mouth, you want to write down what they say.Of course. Although mainly about dogs nowadays. I’m very romantic about animals. I feed the birds twice a day. Doves come down at midday to be fed.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Delectable, who is a horse, being the only filly in an otherwise male race and also very pretty, for a horse, is the subject of a lot of male horse attention. A lot of the male men talk as though they fancy her as well. But it’s fine, because it just makes her run faster. Chemotherapy is a nightmare With the help of the club’s ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, and his sassy Press Officer, Dora Belvedon, he becomes increasingly fond of his riotous mix of players, despite bawling them out whenever they face defeat. It sounds puritanical. Why feel guilty about pleasure? But I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed covers. It’s wonderful to give people guilty pleasures in that way. In literary fiction, sex is ever present but is often used as a device to explore issues of consent, misogyny and identity. "There are a lot of sexually explicit books that feel quite dark and gritty – and my friends and I just want pure sauce!" says Buchanan. "I love the work of writers like Abby Jimenez, Akwaeke Emezi and Melanie Blake – they are great at writing sex that is fun to read, and genuinely erotic. They are upholding Jilly's legacy, and I hope I am too."The upcoming Disney+ adaptation of Rivals – starring Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer and Katherine Parkinson – might also pull in a whole new generation of Jilly Cooper fans. There is apparently so much sex on the show, on which Jilly is an executive producer, that Disney+ hired two intimacy coordinators for the set.

Valent Edwards says “bluddy” because he is from Yorkshire, but how else would you pronounce “bloody”? He also says “fooking”, but what accent is that? Paris Alvaston, trying to teach public schoolboy wannabe footballers how to talk common (because “footballers resent public schoolboys”), advises that they start saying “pass” to rhyme with “gas”, by which I guess one infers that the working classes of the home counties also have to adjust their accents to play football because they are only allowed to come from Leicester. Burge points to TikTok, where the #spicybooks hashtag has nearly five billion views. It was TikTok that helped drive the enormous success of Colleen Hoover, whose books lean more heavily into traditional romance than Cooper's, but also contain plenty of sex.Sunak described your books as a guilty pleasure. Do you agree with the concept of guilty pleasures? I used to say that the literary world is divided into two sets: people like me who long for a kind word in the Guardian and people in the Guardian who long for my sales. Isn’t that awful? Everybody tells me it ought to be but I’m going to write one about Sparta. It was the only place in ancient Greece where adultery was allowed. It was punished everywhere else but not in Sparta with all these macho men. It gave me an idea for people going on holiday to Sparta to recreate it. I want to write about the sexes sorting themselves out because they’re in an awful muddle now.