Sunak described your books as a guilty pleasure. Do you agree with the concept of guilty pleasures? A giddy, sexy, exuberant romp of a story...a total tonic, offering the sort of glorious escapism we're all desperately in need of' - Daisy Buchanan Really, though? Could one man invent these things, bring them to market and get rich enough to buy a football team? I have always doubted Cooper’s understanding of the business sphere. I had my doubts during Rivals about whether success was as easy as walking into a fundraising bid with three buttons of your shirt undone, rather than two. But, at the end of the day, she is rich and I am not. Class is complicated 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. When you think everyone is fantastically attractive, that helps. It’s 38 years since Rupert appeared in Riders. He is now 67, which means we met him when he was 29, although he came off more like 35. Never mind; age cannot wither him, being the handsomest man in the world. Of course, everyone biologically related to him, children and grandchildren, is outstandingly beautiful, as is his wider circle and household. It would besmirch his supremacy were he to stand next to anyone not handsome.

Despite being a nation with a reputation for prudishness about sex, the British don't seem to have any problem reading about it, at least not if you go by the enduring popularity of one the country's most successful writers, Jilly Cooper. Known as the Queen of the "bonkbuster" (a British term for a popular novel stuffed with salacious storylines and frequent sexual encounters), she even counts the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as one of her fans. For those who came of age in the UK in the 1980s or 90s, the covers of Cooper's raunchy books alone are forever imprinted on their memory, such was their ubiquity on bookshelves and sun loungers, or in schools, where they were shared like contraband by teenage girls. This positive attitude to sex was a huge influence when Buchanan started writing her own novels. "My first novel, Insatiable, wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Jilly Cooper's novels," she says. "Jilly's books formed my emotional sex education, and Insatiable… owes an enormous debt to Rivals and Riders. I wanted to write escapist sex with real emotions."It’s funny, with all this wish fulfilment (these chronicles get more and more like fairytales as they go along), to get a cold-hairdryer of medical reality. But you know how, in literary novels, no one ever has a job? It’s the same with cancer; they either get it and die or they get it and – plot twist – don’t die. None of them mention sitting on a plastic chair with a chemo drip, then their wee being mauve and their poo being like gravel. This is a useful corrective to the prevailing thinking on cancer – “stay positive”. Even if you don’t die, it’s still absolutely awful. Give entrepreneurialism a shot – it’s much easier than it looks The novel features a gay relationship between a player and manager. How do you feel about homosexuality still being taboo in football? But while there is much to celebrate in Cooper's portrayals of sex, it wasn't always fun – or consensual. "There are rapes that happen in Jilly's books, and it is very rare that the rapist has any kind of comeuppance," says Burge. In one particularly disturbing scene in Riders, Rupert coerces his wife Helen into a sexual act. "It's a really horrible scene," says Burge. "Those aspects are difficult to read now." Its release is eagerly awaited by her legions of devoted fans. For an author whose books are filled with snobbery, Cooper attracts surprisingly little. She's read by both men and women, adored by fellow writers including Ian Rankin, Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes and loved by Cambridge academics. When Sunak came out as a fan of Cooper's books earlier this year, he explained that "you need to have escapism in your life". Along with her new book, a big-budget adaptation of Rivals is coming soon to Disney+.

Horses also hold a lot of the dynastic energy, as each prized thoroughbred sires another who looks just like him and wins stuff. Yet, in the end, they are dispensable; they can be bitten to death by other horses (Love Rat in Mount!) without disrupting the fundamentally romantic atmosphere. So, they are almost like a dialectical echo, the melodrama against the drama, the depth against the lightness. Conran's classic Lace (featuring an infamous goldfish scene) was especially explicit about women's right to sexual pleasure. "There's a character who has never had an orgasm before and then she has a male partner who basically says: 'you have as much right to an orgasm as anyone else'," says Burge. "They talk about it and communicate in a very modern way for a book published in 1982." If the pressure is on for her books to be full of filth, it may be because she is the last bastion of the genre as we know it. Collins died in 2015, Krantz in 2019, and Conran hasn't published a novel since the 1990s. Cooper has said she has an idea for one more book after this, set in Sparta, the only place in ancient Greece where adultery was allowed. But will her last novel signal the death of the bonkbuster? Cooper with the stars of the Disney adaption of her novel Rivals, from left: Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer, David Tennant, Aidan Turner. Photograph: Disney+ Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin…

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”.

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. Truth be told, he has been having a tantrum since he washed the vaginal deodorant out of Helen’s privates in 1985. He is always sleeping badly, and sustaining injuries, and pretending they don’t hurt, and crusading to victory (polo) with a dislocated shoulder, and covering his pain with stoicism and more tantrums. In Cooper’s telling,this is incredibly hot and he is exactly the kind of man you want in your corner (and four-poster bed). Young people are not only having less sex than their parents' generation did at their age, but are apparently less entertained by it in popular culture too. A recent study by the Center for Scholars and Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA said found that half of Gen Z would prefer to see less sex on screen and more platonic relationships. Movies already have fewer sex scenes.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. Keeping it fun. Make the people glamorous and create an atmosphere of excitement. You have to imagine you’re having it with somebody. I had a heavenly husband [publisher Leo Cooper] who died 10 years ago and he was wonderful at sex. So I used to just imagine what we’d been up to.