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“... answer from his father to the question: ‘Dad, are we ethnic?’). In so far as class is amusing, Jilly Cooper has not let her subject down. She quotes the Registrar General and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations ...”

“... Jilly Cooper​ ’s work is not, so far as I know, much studied in universities. 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 ...”

“... I once found​ a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Class (1979) in the bargain box outside a friend’s second-hand bookshop. When I asked how much it was he winced visibly and said: ‘Just take it, I can’t bear to have it in the shop.’ Subtitled ‘A View from Middle England’ and written in Cooper’s usual rollicking style, it’s a witty read spiked with detailed observations of life in the 1970s and based on the good-natured assumption that everyone is a snob about something and to that extent we are all ridiculous ...”

“... which is contained a secret which will give to its possessor power over the world. Oh God, give me Jilly Cooper. Even so, I suspended my disbelief in the line of duty, and read all about it. After all, King Solomon’s Mines is about buried treasure in the heart of Africa, and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World about prehistoric monsters stranded over the ...”

“... naturally) compared to the discovery that the list of the BWMA’s honorary members – there’s Jilly Cooper, Peter Hitchens, Norris McWhirter, mad Patrick Moore – includes the name of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ...”

“... with flopping blond hair, Taylor-Johnson captured the Sleeping Beauty, the icon.’I mean, Jilly Cooper couldn’t improve on that, and neither could Defoe. But the Defoe tradition isn’t kind to women. Moll Flanders is a con artist, a thief, ‘an abominable creature’, a kept woman and a curse. Groaning with excited repugnance, Bower appears ...”

“... a romantic hero could be a soldier or a doctor or, heaven help us, a priest. But in the age of Jilly Cooper and Judith Krantz he had better be a polo player. Work is for pigs, and anyone without enough money to coat themselves in leisure had no place in a Krantz novel. There was something nouveau about the new bonkbusters that perfectly suited the ...”

“... we learn that Powell’s favourite-ever film was Stroheim’s Foolish Wives; and that Jilly Cooper turned up to lunch wearing shorts (‘for which she is perhaps getting a shade too grown-up’). Powell speculates about Kingsley Amis’s mental health around the time of the publication of the latter’s Memoirs, which upset him by repeating ...”

“... in the Popular Fiction entry. Similarly excluded are Judith Krantz, Jean Auel, Danielle Steel, Jilly Cooper, Mary Higgins Clark, V.C. Andrews, Shirley Conran, Jackie Briskin, Rosemary Rogers. All these names have figured in recent best-seller lists, lists which are dominated by women novelists of no apparent interest to the Companion. It is ...”

“... as well as those that are spectacularly right.’ Right or wrong, the rude ones are the best. Jilly Cooper’s is particularly enjoyable; I’m not convinced Cooper didn’t make it up herself: ‘Jilly has set herself an extremely low standard which she has failed to ...”

“... to Whitehall; it is even harder to believe that any such crew would include both A.S. Byatt and Jilly Cooper or place Jeffrey Archer alongside Geoffrey Hill. How, if at all, are these two vignettes from the literary life of the period to be connected? Should we be wondering about the ways commercial changes in the world of publishing affected the ...”