[On meeting the editor of The Sunday Times magazine at a dinner party in 1969.] I told him about being a young wife: screwing all night, then going t… - Jilly Cooper

[In her novel, Score, a male character is murdered while sexually aroused.] I rang Stroud police to ask whether the male member stays up at the point of death. They told me it definitely does.

[On her novels] I know they are frivolous imperfect But people love them — you should see the letters I get! Maybe one day I will write something more serious but I don’t want to come across like a ghastly actor who wants to play Hamlet. Basically my aim in life is to add to the sum of human happiness My dear is that pompous hmmm? Darling am I being boring?

There's hard porn, soft porn and Jilly Cooper. Not that Mrs Cooper's latest little nonsense would get any Portnoy award, but I do worry about the influence on young minds of this peculiar combination of romantic fantasy and permissiveness (Barbara Cartland without the iron knickers). Fired by such goings-on as are chronicled in Octavia, heaven knows what the precociously pubescent will get up to.