Daisy Buchanan, author of books including Insatiable and Limelight, host of the You're Booked podcast and Jilly Cooper superfan, first discovered the writer as a teenager. "I think I was about 13 when I fell in love with Jilly's books," she tells BBC Culture. "Riders and Rivals were being passed around at school, almost 20 years after they were first published, which is a testament to her power. Her stories are dramatic, extravagant, escapist tales – but while she sets her books in glamorous worlds, her characters are so vulnerable, loveable and human. It's only in Jilly-land where you get heroines who triumph while feeling self-conscious about their spots." 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. 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.

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 I spoke to my lovely former neighbour Tony Adams a lot and also players at my local club, Forest Green Rovers. Then a new manager arrived and got rid of all my friends. It’s such a ruthless sport but that makes for good fiction. I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed covers 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. 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 Not much. Disney want me to keep my trap shut. But I’ve seen the first episodes and it’s wonderful.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”. 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+.

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. 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. 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. Cooper with the stars of the Disney adaption of her novel Rivals, from left: Alex Hassell, Danny Dyer, David Tennant, Aidan Turner. Photograph: Disney+ 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.

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. 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." 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 Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin…

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. 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. 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.She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals’ … Jilly Cooper at home. Photograph: Thousand Word Media/Alamy Always wear cashmere 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.