Polo: The lavish and racy classic from Sunday Times bestseller Jilly Cooper

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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. It was also through Cooper's books that I learned I was quite common. The signs were all there: we said "toilet", "lounge", "mirror", "TV". My sister and I had stopped calling our mother "mummy" before we turned five. Our father would keep putting sauce bottles on the table, and calling dinner "tea" (which he insisted be served at a déclassé 6pm). Meanwhile, NafessaWilliams ( Whitney Houston: IWannaDance with Somebody) plays Cameron Cook,a ferociously talented American TV executive, who’s brought toCoriniumby Tony to produce Declan’s newprime-timetalk show. Cooper doggedly insists he is the handsomest man in England, something I always found hard to picture, since I don't find blond men attractive, especially when they murder foxes for fun. This is exactly the sort of snitty remark, by the way, that Cooper would expect of a hairy-legged feminist like me. Feminists of all stripes get very short shrift in her novels (which is interesting, given that she was the main breadwinner throughout most of her marriage), but hairy-legged ones, by which I suppose she means second wave, are the worst.

Riders is a 1985 novel written by the English author Jilly Cooper. It is the first of a series of romance novels known as the Rutshire Chronicles, which are set in the fictional English county of Rutshire. The story focuses on the lives of a group of top show jumping stars and follows the ups and downs of both their personal and professional lives. It was turned into a television film, Riders (1993), directed by Gabrielle Beaumont for Anglia Television and broadcast on the ITV Network. There's no Rivals trailer yet but we’ll be sure to post a trailer for Rivals as soon as it lands. Behind the scenes and locations on Rivals Claire Rushbrook as Cathy Rowley in Sherwood. (Image credit: BBC/House Productions/Matt Squire) Who else is starring in Rivals? Danny Dyer, meanwhile, is swapping ‘Eastenders’ for the countryside to play Freddie Jones, a noble-minded self-made electronics millionaire who, along with his wife Valerie (Lisa McGrillis), finds himself victim of Rutshire snobbery. At least, until Rupert and Tony need some of his dosh for a business proposition.

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Part of Jilly Cooper’s racy 10-book ‘Rutshire Chronicles’ series – named after the fictional county in which its set –‘Rivals’ follows members of England’s ruling elite as they fall in and out of bed with each other and claw each other’s eyes out to get ahead. My mother denied it, of course. For her, class was an unfixed quantity; something mutable and shifting, that could be outstripped with a little ingenuity. And maybe she was right. A lot of it is context dependent. If I lost caste when I left primary school and ceased to be the only child who did her homework, then I slithered even further down the scale at university.

Anyonealiveand of reading age in the ’80s will have come across a Jilly Cooper novel. Dubbed ‘bonkbusters’, the English novelist’s ripe, pre-’50 Shades of Grey’ tales full of powerful executives,horny polo players and sexy showjumpers questing after other men’s wives and businesses, they often leaned heavily into the dual meaning of the word ‘stud’. On 5 November 2019 BBC News included Riders on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels. [1] Plot [ edit ]In addition Aidan also told The Times in a recent interview: “We have so much sex on our show, we have to have two intimacy coaches. Two! Before I read Cooper, I thought the same. My imaginary poshness was borne out by the others kids at school, who called me "posh snob", a moniker I'd done little to earn. beyond handing my homework in on time and having a weird, posh name. In the 1980s, Tabitha was still rare enough that you couldn't find it on mugs or doorplates. When I complained about this to my mother, she pulled a sententious face and said: "I gave you your name so you would have chances." She was a teacher and had seen colleagues running through the names in their registers on the first day of school, saying: "Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Hmmm, might be all right?" Cooper's recent works received a variety of responses from critics, with The Guardian praising "her near-magical ability to conjure up a world and populate it with people for whom you feel a deep affection" [4] and Express calling Jump "one of her most captivating novels yet." [5] The Rutshire Chronicles [ edit ]