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

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She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals’ … Jilly Cooper at home. Photograph: Thousand Word Media/Alamy Always wear cashmere 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 equine narrative architecture of Rutshire is fascinating. The horses act as repositories for all the deep human emotions, especially for the shy or overlooked characters, who can only be themselves around a horse, and also for the stiff-upper-lipped, who can only truly adore a horse. Cooper has always had a bizarre hatred of feminists (or her narrow idea of them at least; in her books they can usually be spotted by their unshaven legs) even though all her heroines are feminists to anybody else. On the plus side she is (and always has been) supportive of gay rights, anti-racist, very unpuritan, very sex-positive.

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 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.There's still something infectiously joyful and funny about [Cooper's] particular brand of very English writing The Observer In the old days her books were passed round by teenagers sharing the dirty bits – perhaps young people don’t need that in today’s world. But the appeal, then and now, isn’t only the sex: it’s the access to a glamorous world of high-end jobs and lives and luxury trappings that readers don’t see every day, all relayed with Jilly’s signature warmth, humour and good-heartedness. 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 The beautiful game is not an obvious choice for Jilly. It’s not posh enough compared with previous topics such as polo or classical music. You can trust her on men, haircuts, horses and dogs, clothes – but what she sweetly calls “football slang” at one point, maybe not so much. I enjoyed this helpful match report: “7–4 to Searston, who had scored the most goals so came out on top”, and the goalkeeper who rushes up the field to score a goal. With her talent for boisterous plots and dialogue, Cooper delivers feisty fun ... With this novel, Cooper shoots again and scores Daily Telegraph

A female journalist says, “I can’t cope with all this MeToo business. In my day, you said ‘eff off’ if men were awful, and ‘eff on’ if they were lush,” and her reward is that her male interview subject puts a caressing hand on “a thigh fake-tanned more orange than the car”. Rupert dislikes football and his first impressions of Searston are distinctly unfavourable. But as their new and indelibly competitive Chairman, he won’t stand for anything less than an Everest climb to the top of the Premier League. 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 His daughter persuades him to buy a failing local football team, so that he can sign up her star striker boyfriend. Rupert is not a football fan, but his competitive streak means he immediately sets about getting them to the top of the Premier League, on the way dealing with a corrupt rival team and, inevitably, a group of Wags lusting after him. Jilly Cooper was made a CBE in 2018 (Photo: John Stillwell/Getty)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.