Rupert Campbell-Black, wealthy landowner, sometime world champion showjumper, sometime Tory MP and sports minister, exuder of brio, glamour and charisma, is an all-round amoral charmer and shit, immune to scandal and opinion, and the envy of lesser men.

The best-known figure in her novels is the most dominant of males, a character created from a mixture of Mr Rochester, Clark Gable, Casanova, the late Alan Clark MP, and – apparently – various dashing and extant English aristocrats, including Andrew Parker Bowles. ‘I must say I do have a sneaking guilty hankering for dominant males myself,’ Cooper wrote in 1977, and nothing much seems to have changed since then as far as the main thrust of her fiction goes. They have increasingly huge casts of characters and a propensity for subplots worthy of Trollope or Dickens, usually hingeing on sex, class or institutional power, or sometimes all three at once. The point of view always seems to be comfortably located there, admiring the aristocracy, mocking the awkward aspirations of the nouveaux riches, sending children to public schools, riding to hounds, fonder of horses than of reading, dividing the working class into the deserving poor and the probably criminal, sometimes casually though not always consciously racist, and committed to the conventional gender roles that comedy has traditionally worked to uphold, even when it’s described as ‘wickedly subversive’.

They all, especially the series of hefty Rutshire Chronicles, delight in the entertainments of rural upper-middle-class life. The novels are not gritty or realistic, nor do they take themselves very seriously. There is a particular pleasure in reading about pleasure: pleasure delayed and deferred, guilty pleasure, the pleasure of repetition and the problems of it. It sometimes feels as if I’m in a Jilly Cooper novel, on the wrong side of some rivalry, the butt of village gossip, or even one of her caricature academics – who tend to be bearded, left-wing and ‘bootfaced’, with dubious personal hygiene and ineffectual yearnings.īut if you set aside for a moment the ‘raunchy’ cover pictures, the breathless titles ( Score! or Wicked! or Jump!), and the publicists’ emphasis on wall-to-wall sex, you do find something worth reading and worth thinking about, which is pleasure, that most ticklish of subjects.

In the Senior Combination Room one lunchtime recently, when I mentioned that I was writing this review, a Very Senior Person slumped forward with his head in his hands, muttering: ‘Oh no, soft porn!’ Other people either laugh, or look quizzically at me and hurry away. ’s work is not, so far as I know, much studied in universities.

Riders jilly cooper series