Backlisted - Imogen by Jilly Cooper - Revisit

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

To honour the life of Jilly Cooper, we are replaying this joyous episode from 2019 with a new introduction. Joining Andy and John in this episode are Daisy Buchanan, writer, feminist, host of the brilliant You’re Booked podcast. Daisy’s latest book Read Yourself Happy - How to Use Books to Ease Your Anxiety is published by Dorling Kindersley. She is joined by Dr. Ian Patterson, a poet and retired academic who taught English for 20 years at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Ian has just written Books, A Manifesto or, How To Build A Library which is published by Orion. The main book under discussion is is Imogen by Jilly Cooper, first published by Arlington Books in 1978, the fifth in her now legendary series of 7 ‘romances’ published between 1975 and 1981. Also in this episode, Andy overcomes his horror of football to praise J.L. Carr’s 1975 classic How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup while John toasts the memory of the great children’s author and illustrator, John Burningham. *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted *We will be appearing live in NYC on Mon 27th Oct 2025 at 92NY and on Weds Oct 29th 2025 at The Bitter End - come and say hello. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Andy Miller. And it's Nikki Birch, the producer, are backlisted. There's actually one more public service message. Yes, if you're listening to this in mid-October 2025, we're very excited to be able to tell you that earlier today, Monday, 13th October, we had a message from the 92nd Street Y in New York at 929.9.9.9.9.org, you're going to want to remember that address in a minute. Nikki, why are we excited? What's happening? Well, because we are coming to New York for our first ever series of live shows in two weeks time. And they've said to us, guys, I'm really sorry, but you've sold out the small room. We are now playing not merely a bigger room, but the biggest room at the 92nd Street. Why?

So it's the kind of thing that like a big podcast say, don't they? We're playing the Albert Hall. The last act I saw in that room at the 92nd Street by was Steve Martin. So I will be personally speaking, I will be following in the footsteps of Steve Martin in a couple weeks. I believe Barack Obama has played there as well. I believe so and everybody else. So we're at the 92nd Street Y on Monday the 27th of October at 7.30 p.m. We're recording a live show on the subject of the famous New Yorker editing. and writer William Maxwell.

And we are really excited because we're going to be joined by Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, in fact, no less, and Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker. And in addition to 2025, marking our 10th birthday, it's also the 100th anniversary of the New Yorker. So we're kind of stacking up all the celebrations in one night. Plus, of course, seeing lots of you there. First of all, we'd like to say thank you to everyone who's already bought tickets. Nikki, would you like to impress upon people why this represents a golden opportunity for those who have yet to book their places? First of all, Andy, it's great because more of you can come to see us.

And second of all, you can bring your friends because we've got a lot more tickets to sell in the next fortnight. Yes. And just a fortnight in which to shift them. The second show we're doing when we're in New York in the same week, just two nights later, on Wednesday the 29th of October, we are at the bitter end, the club in Greenwich Village, Bleaker Street, and we'll be discussing books written by the Nobel laureate himself, Bob Dylan, and that will include his novel Tarantula, his lyrics, collection, writings, and drawings, first volume. of his memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, not Chronicles Volume 2, as it turns out, because he may not even have written it. I've no idea. But we are really excited. There are still tickets available for that show, and they are available via bitterend.com. Yeah, I mean,

it's what's really nice about both the 92MI and Bitterend.com is they're playing in venues we don't normally play at. Normally it's bookshops, and this time it's like concert, halls and nightclubs. So that's quite exciting. Hey, we own it, Nikki Birch. We earned it. But at the bitter end, we're going to be hanging out after me. We're going to have a chance to kind of meet everybody afterwards and come and you can tell us about all the books we should have covered on backlisted that we haven't, etc., and we're looking forward to meeting everyone there.

So please do come along to Bitter End. And even if you don't like Dylan, some people don't even like Dylan. Who would think that? But most people do, which is great. and most people like us, hopefully. So you can come and chat with us and we've blocked out the whole evening to spend time with you guys.

So please, please come and see us. Hope to see you all there. Now, we were sad to learn this week of the death of the wonderful Jilly Cooper at the age of 88. Jilly Cooper had a long and glorious career as a novelist from Emily in 1975. to tackle in 2023 with a series of funny, sexy, inimitable escapades,

including the so-called Rutscher Chronicles, every one of which was bought and read in the hundreds of thousands. And the word that seems to have appeared over and over again in the tributes tour over the last few days is joy. And both on the page and in person, joy was Jilly Cooper's gift to the world. So this week, as a tribute to Jilly, we are rerunning an episode from our backlist, which was a joy to make. And which seems to have brought a lot of joy to listeners to. It's show number 84 from January 2019, which is about Jilly Cooper's fifth novel, Imogen.

Back then, Andy and John were joined by author and podcaster Daisy Buchanan and poet and academic Dr. Ian Patterson. The episode was recorded in person, and as you'll hear, we had a lot of fun talking about Jilly's work, reading a noun from him. and making one another laugh. Shortly after that podcast went out, John and I and our guests all received handwritten notes from Jilly herself, thanking us in all sincerity for featuring one of her books on the show. To date, this is the only occasion

on which the subject of an episode of Backlisted has written in to show their appreciation. Still, not a peep out of Anthony Trollope. Terrible manners. We thought you might like to hear what Jilly wrote to Mitch on the back of a wooden postcard that he now proudly keeps on his desk. Here's what she said. Darling John, I cannot imagine anything more lovely happening to an author. I was completely knocked sideways by listening to you all. I kept thinking, heavens, is this really me you're talking about?

Thank you so, so much. You made it all so funny and picked out bits I'd forgotten I'd written, and I suddenly felt so proud of what you all presented so charmingly. I am extremely grateful, and that has extremely in capital letters. I was a bit downcast because my current novel on football is crawling along, but podcast is now the opposite of downcast. All my love, Jilly Cooper, kiss. As everyone has been saying, Jilly really was a class act. We should probably also mention that both.

the guests on this episode have recently written books about books that you might enjoy. Daisy Buchanan's is called Read Yourself Happy, How to Use Books to Ease Your Anxiety, and that was published back in February. And Ian Patterson's Books, A Manifesto, or How to Build a Library, came out just a few weeks ago to rave reviews, including one from none other than Jilly Cooper herself. Perfect. Anyway, please join us in raising a glass of something sparkly to Jilly. It's what she would have wanted.

Enjoy this episode and see you next time. We were talking earlier on when we were talking about the problem of consistent excellence. Yeah. That if a writer or a filmmaker or a musician just managing is to make a series of consistently excellent records or books or films. It almost works against them. My feeling with the Coen's is that people look at them and go, ah, yes, another consistently excellent Coen Brothers film.

I've already seen half a dozen excellent Coen Brothers films. I'm a huge fan of Inside Lewin Davis, which is it came out about five years ago. For me, that is, if that had been made by other filmmakers, that would be acclaimed as a great, great film about the limits of creativity. But because it was a Coen Brothers film, And people go, yeah, it's another Cohn Brothers film. I think that's interesting.

I think there's a body of work there. I mean, you could say the same thing about, I mean, Bergman or Hitchcock. You know, they consistently excellent. I mean, both, I think, made 50 films. Not all of them, maybe as good. But the Cone Brothers are kind of, I think they're in, sort of in that league. You're right that they get maybe taken for granted. But I think there's always the chance you can go back.

When we were in Reckiavick, God, that was, we were still doing this podcast when we were in Rick. We went to the Lubowski Bar in Reckiavick. Brilliant. Oh, it was good. I did have White Rush. Did you ever meet as a Dutch publisher called Oscar Van Gelderen? Have you ever met him? No.

But he looks just really, really, really similar to Jeff Bridges in that movie. And he has a very, very similar kind of cool, you know, in the way it's a Dutch. There's a sort of cool ways of being. He's got, that's just kind of, yeah, whatever. We'll have, hey, let's have fun. Let's get fucked up. But anyway, if Oscar's listening. unlike you.

He's a brilliant. He's a brilliant. He's a brilliant. He was, as you would expect, the publisher that brought stoner to the world. Was he? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

Today, you join us stacking books in a dreary public library in a small northern town, half listening to the buzz of local gossip, hoping that someone impossibly dashing, witty, and yet also kind, would whisk us all down to the south of France for sun-kissed frolic.

and romance. I'm John Mitchinson. And I'm Andy Miller. And joining us today is Daisy Buchanan. Hello. Hello, Daisy is a writer, feminist and regular contributor across TV and radio from Woman's Hour in this morning to The Guardian, Telegraph, Grazie and the Pool. Daisy's latest book is How to Be Grown Up and is soon to be followed in March by The Sisterhood, a love letter to the women who have shaped me, and that's going to be published by Headline. She is the host. She is the host. of the Your Booked podcast. Brilliant books podcast.

On which I have been privileged to appear. Before Christmas, her and her producer Dale came round and invaded my privacy. With my permission, and looked at my bookshelves and passed judgment on them. We've been in your shed. You have been in my shed. But the podcast is really brilliant, backlisted listeners. If you don't know your book, it's people talking about their bookshelves, their book collections. Yes, it's about.

people's formative reading memories and the books in their life. And what I really, really hope to do, whether or not I succeed, heaven knows. But to describe books are sort of loved, touched, fondled objects. Now, I can't believe I said fondled this early on before we do discussion. Daisy was keen for me to tell you that she is a proud member of the Jilly Cooper Book Club. Many of whom, judging by the response on Twitter Day, are batlisted listeners. I must say, the spike in people going. Yeah, extraordinary.

Saying how excited they were where we were doing Jilly Cooper. and Daisy has been to Jilly Cooper's house. So we're also joined by Ian Patterson, who is a former secondhand bookseller, a recovering academic. Also true. And a practising poet. Certainly so.

He taught English for almost 20 years at Queen's College, Cambridge. Ian's latest poetry collection, Bound to be, was published by Equipage in 2017, and his poem, The Plenty of Nothing, an analogy for his late wife, the writer Jenny Disky, was the winner of the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

Ian, you wrote a long essay about Jilly Cooper, which was published in the LRB in 2017, I think, yes. And you too have been to Jilly Cooper's house. Yes, I have. Jilly wrote to me and invited us to lunch, Olivia and I, to lunch after she had read it, which is very flattering and was a very enjoyable occasion indeed. Because you got into the telegraph.

It was thoroughly the idea of you'd actually because you haven't really compared it exactly to Dickens and you sort of did. It wasn't just the telegraph. It was about seven papers. It was a mad. It went viral the story. And it's a Cambridge Don compared bonking jilly

to Austin and Dickens. I remember a bonking as if she's in a constant state of frottage. Yes, absolutely, at least. Yes, well, you probably gathered what we're here to talk about. We are, in fact, here to talk about Jilly Cooper. But it's a specific, we're at least using one Jilly Cooper to jumpstart, which I'm sure will be a more general discussion of her oeuvre. It's Imogen, first published by Arlington Books in 1978,

although most famously the paperback, I think, that came out in 79. It was the fifth in her now legendary series of seven romances, published between 1975 and 1981. So it's now the customary question, Andy. What have you been reading this week? I've been reading a novel by J.L. Carr, and long-term listeners to this podcast will recall that the very first episode of Battlisted

was about J.L. Carr's novel a month in the country. And in my real and occasionally private life, I have attempted to read one J.L. Carr novel a year since we did that podcast because if you remember John one of the things about J.L. Carr which is fascinating as a writer is he never wrote the same novel twice

and in fact although you can recognize certain tropes repeating if you read a few of them nevertheless they tend to be very different from one another he tended to find an event in his own life that he would then work out from imaginatively and he was a publisher as well as well as I said

on the podcast, I remember buying books from him when he came into the shop in like 1993, when he was hand-selling copies of Harpole and Foxborough. Anyway, the novel of his that I read was How Steeple-Sindaby Wanderers Won the FAA Cup, which, as you will appreciate, it was quite a reach for me because it's about football. And as the author of a book about how much I dislike sport, I thought, well, I'll give this a go. And of course, it's wonderful. And several people said to me, well, it's not really about football.

It is about English country life. It is about English country life. But let's not kid ourselves. It is about football. There is a spoiler in the title as well. They do win the FA Cup. So I'm giving nothing away. But what I would say about it is it's one of his more straightforwardly funny novels.

It's quite slight, but it has all those beautiful breaks into lyricism, which I think other novelists would find it quite difficult to manage the contrast. He does this very brilliant thing, a bit like Beryl Bainbridge. He does this really brilliant thing of managing to balance character against situation to give something melancholy, funny but melancholy, I think. There's also that kind of football nostalgia, which I know you don't massively indulge in, but they're kind of, you know, the old jumpers for goalposts, leather, heavy, leather the footballs, the book weirdly that I reminded me of it when I read it right back when we did

the podcast, so of course my memory of it is slight now, but except enjoying it a lot, was it reminded me of Best and Edwards. Oh, that's a good book. There are bits about the Duncan Edwards story. Gordon Byrne. And kind of provincial English football and the kind of the culture of the game that He captures, as you say, it's about rural life, but it is also about football culture. I thought what I would do is instead of reading an excerpt from how Steeples seem to be Wanderers won the FA Cup,

I just read the blurb because we like blurbs on this podcast. And J.L. Carr wrote these blurbs himself, of course. This is in addition published by his publisher, the Quince Tree Press. So I'll just read you how J.L. Carr wanted you to think of this novel. This is how the blurb. start. Book writing can be a tedious job needing some incentive to keep one at it. The impulse here was can this unbelievable feat be made to sound like the truth even though it didn't happen? So I stacked the cards, a foreigner with remarkable theories, two young men with good reasons for having quit

top-class football, a chairman of Napoleonic ability. Then I dredged up memories of 1930 when I was an unqualified teacher, 18 years old and playing that single season for South Milford White Rose, when we won a final which never ended. Pitch invasion and furious fights are not new things. I learnt much of rural life during that long-gone autumn, winter and early spring. But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want to believe it. J.L. Carr, 1992, Fridion.

Now, what an extraordinary blurb? Doesn't that make you want to read the book? Absolutely. He's no, Jail Khan, no fool, I would suggest that. And the other thing is that there is a kind of harmonic resonance with a month in the country. So you feel that a lot of the detail of his understanding and feel for rural life that that book is full of is also there in Sindabe. I'm not going to read it, but he does a similar and fabulous thing. as in a month in the country,

where he holds something back for the last page, and he does a kind of switch on the last page, which is extremely moving and makes you feel like what you've been reading, while it's been presented to you as quite light, has in fact meant a lot more to the person telling you the story than you might at first have thought. So I strongly recommend that,

how steeple seem to be Wanderers won, the FA Cut by JL Car, now published, in fact, by Penguin Modern Classics. There is a Penguin. much condition. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've decided to talk about this week, not a single book, but a whole lifetime. Very sad and I'll announce this week the death of John Birmingham, who John Burningham is one of the, I think, giants of children's book. Writing and illustration came to prominence 1964 with his book, Borker, The Goose Without Feathers,

and has since then, right until the very end, produced remarkable books, beautiful, visual, rich books, very funny, dry, wry, witty stories. And I had the great fortune to almost publish his last book. We worked very hard on a book of his called Champagne, and we're about to open some champagne. One of the great things about John was whenever you went to see him, there would be champagne on the go. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't just because he was doing the book. He loved it. And I remember going to see him, it was a long and complicated story as to why, but he couldn't find a publisher for the book, which seemed incredible.

You know, having been one of the great, he lives in Hampstead, wonderful, rambling house with his wife, who's also a genius of the genre, Helen Oxenbury, and always champagne open. And he came in the whole book, which is here, the whole book was already done, really. It was just all on a wall. He said, I finished my wall. So he said if the wall's finished, then books finished really, just need to find a way of getting it printed. Anyway, long story short, we couldn't quite do it on Unbound. But I worked with his wonderful designer Ian Craig, who had been back at Random House Children's Books for many years.

The book was laid out by John and Ian together, and it came out last year. And I brought a few of my favourites in, Oe Get Off Our Train, Get Off Our Train and... John Patrick Norman McHennessy, the book who was always late. But I also brought in this incredibly beautiful autobiography, which is full of, and there's apart from amazingly lovely photographs of John and Helen when they were younger, riding around on Vespers in Europe. There is his very dry gloss on his own books. There's a wonderful forward by Morris Sendak.

Because I think Morris Sendak. Maurice. Maurice, of course, Maurice Sendak. And then on the back there's a brilliant thing from Raymond Briggs as well saying That said Birmingham is a blooming nuisance He should retire now after all he's very old But no doubt he will go on and on doing yet more brilliant stuff Raymond Briggs

You've got there Courtney about the dog Oh Courtney this is just the most wonderful So this was published in the early 90s And I don't want to give the ending away It's wonderful It's what the dog gets up to in the story. Courtney is a dog. And this is what he says about the story, right?

He says that Courtney must be loosely based on our dog, Stanley, who was probably a cross between a Labrador and a border collie. All the animals we've ended up as characters in stories sooner or later. And he does the best dogs, the best animals. I bought Stanley from a pet shop in Hastings. He was very likely a result of some liaison between a couple of curs around the fishing huts on the beach. We used to talk to him in a north country accent,

which really had no logic. There are lots of things going on in this story, says John. The parents have an obsession with racial. purity and are determined that the new pet should be a thoroughbred. The father is suspicious of this male who has come into the house and the mother develops a closer relationship with the dog than with her husband. I just love his work. It seems appropriate then given that John Birmingham's champagne

and the subject of this week's podcast, Julie Cooper, that John is about to. Oh! And this is, I'm sure, very relatable for people at home as we see here, quaffing champagne. when you listen to this at seven o'clock on a Monday morning. Enjoy your dried January, kids. Anyway, should we toast? Well, we have John Birmingham's fabulous last book that was finally printed champagne in front of us, but I think he would have loved the idea that we toast him on air. So here's to John Burningham.

Burning him. Well said. I have to raise any other business issue, which is to say that I will be interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Andrew Sean Greer about his novel, less, which is a great favourite of ours at Backlisted. We talked about it on the podcast last year. It's one of my favourite books last year. I will be interviewing him at Waterstone's Piccadilly on Monday, February the 4th. So if you're in London and you feel like coming along and listening to Andrew, be brilliant about his wonderful novel. Please come along.

Now, to the matter in hand. Should we start with the usual question, Andy? Yeah. So turning to Julie Cooper and specifically to Imogen, Daisy, can you remember when you first read this book, this novel Imogen? I'm pretty sure I would have been about 13 or 14 in an area of my school called The Small Hall, which was really a canteen, but they wanted to kind of push up. and I've read riders and rivals and the man who made husbands jealous but this I remember thinking was about Jilly really getting teenagers

and everyone else in Jilly's other books which I'd love they all seemed fantastically glamorous and to live lives entirely unlike mine and Imogen was a girl who worried about her weight and worried that she was a bit boring and worked in a library and longed for someone glamorous sort of come in and change it and I thought

Julie is writing my life where is this sexy tennis player he's clearly nowhere in the small hall we had a slightly creepy gardener who got fired who I think would have whisked in and done the job but it wasn't quite the same Ian Jillie Cooper

when did you first read or encounter Julie Cooper's work well I wasn't really a teenager in any real sense I was more like 66 I didn't know about Judy Cooper and I had read her columns

in the Sunday Times when I were knob at a lad but and enjoyed them very much but I never actually thought that I would enjoy her books but when Jenny was ill and everything seemed pretty dreadful I wasn't really able to concentrate on the sort of reading I ought to have been doing

and Olivia actually said you ought to read Jilly Cooper and pressed a Jilly Cooper into my hand and I said oh God no I couldn't do that and she said go on just try it and I did and I couldn't stop I was completely captivated partly because it was so much more captivating than I'd imagined it would be

and partly because there was nothing else really so I just read and read and read and read and read and read and did you start with the later I started with I think rivals but I quite soon moved on to I think Harriet was probably the first and then Prudence and then Imogen and so on, because they were so undemanding in some ways.

In some ways, yes. And also, in the big books, as one might think of them, those serious weighty tomes like riders and rivals, there's all sorts of grown-up stuff that I might have identified with or failed to identify with. but in these romances it's like Shakespeare's last plays or something

it's just a kind of little magical fantasy world where everything is all yeah or sort of barque preludes is there some sort of purity about it absolutely the word I was going for purity there are no distractions for the action I will say not to because I know we're talking about

the romances and I think listeners are probably familiar with according to Twitter familiar with it all but especially with the the word on the tip of my tongue is bonk-busters, but there we are. But I do love the, I guess,

sort of the 80s, because it's quite Judith Crancy as well, isn't it, like business and, you know, board meetings and people bursting into rooms and having fabulous business ideas. And I find that really, really good fun. Rivals is about a television franchise. And when I read it, I had no idea. I thought ITV was just ITV,

and I had no idea there were regional variations that people bid for in consortium. That was, you know, as well as a sex education, it was quite a lot of, oh, that's how telly works. But Imogen and Octavia and Harriet and Prudence in those books, there were a while that maybe wasn't exactly familiar to me, but it felt like something that I could know and I could appreciate. I've got a blurb to read here, which is the jacket flap on a re-publication of Imogen from the, I think this is like an early 80s edition. You can see Jilly's on the front, it says Jilly Cooper, her Riviera romance image. I don't want to objectify our esteemed author, but can we talk about how absolutely stunning Jilly looks on that cover that?

On that cover? Beautiful photo. On all these covers. It looks incredible. I mean, what a brave and extraordinary thing to do. I was never quite sure. I always assumed it was her on the cover. She's on the cover of all these 70s romances.

This is the blurb that went out on this book, right? and, well, I'll just read it to you and then you can tell me what you think. Girls like Imogen, tied to dreary jobs in provincial towns, are apt to dream of romantic escapes to sun-drenched beaches and to conjure up visions of ultimate bliss in the bronzed arms of the athletic heroes of their nighttime fantasies. Seldom, however, do they have to face up to their dreams coming true?

In Imogen, a rustic Yorkshire Anjanou finds her dreams coming true rather faster than she can cope with them, how she parries the advances of Nikki Beresford, the lecherous tennis ace, and coats with the gropes of the rest of the Riviera drones, will bring a warm glow of reassurance to all those nervous mums whose daughter's tender bosoms have been over-exposed to the Santropay's son. Whoever wrote this, my cap is off to you. Imogen's adventures, as told by Jilly, are totally realistic,

in spite of the fact that unmoved by modern conventions, she is a girl who does not regard her virginity as something to be likely thrown away. Jilly's account of a sensitive girl's approach to her own crisis of conscience in the face of a libidinous and totally materialistic society is handled with that subtlety and delicacy

which distinguishes all her work. Very good. That's really good. At this point, I'm going to bring in our producer, Nikki Birch. Now, Nikki, when did you first read a Jilly Cooper book? Probably when travelling in some hostel, you know, you have no books that you just pick up because it's the only one there,

and that was probably the riders. But I can't really remember it very clearly. And you hadn't read this before this week, had you? I hadn't read Imogen before this week. And what did you make of it? At first, my jaw was dropped to the floor. I think I was really, I was like, I tweeted to both of you and were like, WTF.

Yeah. OMG. You did. You did. FFS. Yeah, my immediate reaction is, I'm so excited to hear what you guys say about this. But it was basically because the treatment of women just shocked me completely. It's like, wow, the last 50 years, we have actually come on a really long way.

I think the thing, Nikki and I found, we'll talk about this, the thing that was brilliant. So you sent me and John a message that said, what, what, what, and then 24 hours later, you sent me a nothing message saying, I think I'm going to read another one. she gets you right yeah yeah i was totally locked in i didn't do anything else apart from apart from read jilly cooper for sort of 24 hours so i'm i'm a hand in heart it was fun yeah i suppose i was just shocked by perhaps some of the things you're going to talk about in the book yeah yeah yeah yeah are you serious domestic violence in passion that's okay you know things like that i felt like really difficult we'll come onto this this is very interesting and i think

one of the things that I found very interesting coming to the book, having not read it before, there are things in the books which are, you know, as we're always saying, of their time. Yep. When my wife, Mrs. Tina Miller, discovered, she doesn't normally listen to Ballistie because she thinks

it encourages me. But when she found out we were doing these books, she said this. Ginny's 1970s romance is Bella, Emily, Harriet Imogen, Lisa and Co., Octavia, and the best one, Prudence. Well, my favourite books as a teenager, and I read them all numerous times.

As Andy will attest, I can recall each one in forensic detail. My very favourite was Prudence, with the cold fish Pendle Mull Holland, dashing at older brother Ace and sexy younger brother Jack. I reread this, Imogen and the short stories these from go over Christmas. And whilst in some ways they've dated, I suspect someone may have done an editorial clean-up in the 90s to remove a few colloquialisms we might not use today. I thought how fortunate I was to read these books at the right age.

It's sort of what you're saying, Daisy, isn't it? They are romantic, funny, literate, sexy but not too sexy, and best of all, the heroines are real girls, with real girls' bodies, hair, aspirations of problems, at least within Jilly's enchanted settings. I also thought, what a debt Helen Fielding owes to these books. But what I like best about them hasn't really dated at all. Jilly's message to her readers, which is Just Be Yourself.

Yeah. What do you think, Daisy? Do you think they, I mean, you know, there are things in them that we might look twice at now, but that stuff feels very current, doesn't it? It really does. I will say I think I'm about, on a good day, three stone heavier than a fat Julie Cooper heroin. The weight, you know, that's the one thing that still troubles me. I know there are plenty of other really problematic things that should trouble me more,

but I'm like, oh God. But what I really love about the way she writes and the observation she makes, and I think this is perhaps one of the reasons why Jilly and writers kind of in her school or writers who are linked with her get dismissed is she's so unremittingly honest and funny about how bloody knackering it is to be a woman and that constant feeling of not looking quite right. I think it might be Fanny in the pursuit of love by Nancy Mitford says something along the line. of if you're sort of constantly looking at your reflection, and I'm going to paraphrase horribly, in my experience,

it's not because you think you look great, it's because you suspect something is amiss. And so much attention is given to, you know, to clothes and appearance as a really fabulous makeover in this book. And I was thinking how interesting it is because the makeover has become, it was such a big part of, I guess, sort of 90s, teen comedy dramas and so much in cinemas. And I was thinking, you know,

Of course, like Clueless is, I think, a film that is a great debt to Julie Cooper. But of course, obviously, you know, clueless is Emma. And I think, you know, Jane Austen and Julie Cooper are similar. They're really, really brilliantly bitchy. What I love so much about Julie is her voice and her tone and her disdain for earnestness. In my Julie Cooper Book Club, hello. It was so interesting to meet these women and these women are in there,

we're in our broadly 30s and 40s. We're a real range of people. There are lots of journalists like me, but also, you know, lawyers, finance experts, people who sort of work in the public sector and the arts, people, you've really big, important jobs. You put us all together in a room. You'd know there was something that we had, that we shared.

These are women who are irreverent, women who have a sense of humour about themselves and women who love pleasure and women who frequently look into shop windows thinking something isn't quite right you mentioned Austin there I mean what I found notable about the way Jilly writes certainly in these books is the prose is a really fascinating mixture like a halfway point between Austin and Woodhouse it seemed to me that the prose is often written for the joy of writing the prose you know the jokes come out she likes a pun she likes a literary reference she likes to keep the plot bowling along she's very good on detail though i mean she's amazingly good she i mean you know

she started as a journalist and that one of the things that i've read this week that really loved i wanted to try and get some context to when the book was being written and during it was published in 78 she was living in putney and there is a truly fabulous diary called the common years about her life in Putney and Dog Walking. What you get the sense of is somebody who's, she's living a life, she's writing about it as a journalist, she's also writing, turning into fiction at the same time. It's all one thing. She's writing about what she knows.

But she's, her research for the books is famously kind of exhausting. And even in the romances, you know, the details of the hotel rooms in Imogen and the meals. It's not product placement, but you get a sense of 70s kind of boutiques on the Riviera. I love Jackie Collins. I love so many writers who are writing commercial women's fiction at this time. But there are definitely, I think, you know, particularly American writers who, they went to the best restaurant and said, I want a bottle of your most expensive champagne and they had lobster and they had stick. And there's none of that in Julie. She is known, I think, as a writer of glamour, but her domestic detail is magnificent. And what I love about Imogen is before you go to the Riviera,

I'd really forgotten how good she is on the detail of the home and the way, you know, the sort of the parish magazine sort of left crumpled and the, you know, the vague mum and being a bit embarrassed because you're not having a joint for Sunday lunch and you're having macaroni cheese and, you know, the dog being overfamiliar and awkward and hiding pants and claiming there for a jumble cell on their own knickers, a laundry that's dropped off a radiator.

I think that's absolutely right. her detail is extraordinary. I think it's something that she does share with Jane Austen, who is also writing about the life that she was living at the same time. And Woodhouse has the other side of her, which is the ability to put fantasy into the clearest and most elegant prose. And she combines those two things quite wonderfully, I think, with a lightness of touch and a capacity to feel as if the novel is being written for you as you read it, which is a She has that thing that, Douglas, this is brilliant. I've said this one, backlisted before, but I think about it a lot.

It's a really good turn of phrase. Douglas Adams' description of Woodhouse as Woodhouse has pure word music. And at her best, you can feel her when she writes getting into kind of that kind of flow where the words are beginning to form this beautiful light kind of Andante of humour, humour and intelligence kind of pushing the thing along. The great thing about her humour, particularly the puns and the jokes,

is that it doesn't matter who articulates them. It's always, in some sense, the authorial character of the prose. It's part of the rhythm of the presence of the same person managing the whole thing. Well, we'd like to, if one of you would like to select something to read from Jilly's work, while you do that, let's listen to you were talking about Jilly writing about what she knows. This is a clip from Jilly Cooper talking on the late show in 2016 about how she got started as a writer. I went to a party when I was on a dinner party and I met this lovely big man with a big laugh and he said, what was I doing at the moment?

So I said, well, I was newly married, and it was quite difficult because I got up in the morning, and I went to work, and then I shop during my lunch hour, got all the things of food, and I went back to work, and then I went home, and I washed my husband's shirts, I armed them, I cooked dinner, I cleaned the flat, and then we made love all night, and then I got up in the morning. and the next day I did the same thing and I did the same thing again for six months and then I died of exhaustion it's a very demanding lifestyle it was it was lovely I was very happy doing it I'm sure you were anyway but it's a very nice way to spend some time

it was nice but I mean so Godfrey laughed and he said oh gosh write about it and so I did and I handed it in it was in the English colour magazine in Sunday Times and then it appeared and I got nice job off at that week. The thing about Julie Cooper is, as you can hear from that clip, is, you know, anyone could get a break.

Well, not anyone could get a break. But if you get that break, what do you do with that break? She works really hard. She works really hard all the way through the late 60s through the 70s. And she's operating at a really high level. She's writing a novel a year. She's a regular columnist in more than one newspaper. She's publishing collection of journalism.

She's got a diary and she's writing and she's writing fiction. And the, you know, the Sunday Times piece is. Some of the interviews are just fabulous. I mean, reading her, she did two interviews with Thatcher, which both of which. Brilliant. Brilliant. She did a terribly damaging interview with Neil Kinnock. Which is, I mean, unfortunately, very funny.

But she, you know, she talks about the Tory Party conference. I mean, this is a proper satire. Ted Heath sat sulking and huffed up like a great gilded Tomcat, whose mistress has forgotten the whiskers. I mean, she's good. That's the thing. If you listen to the first Desert Island discs, it's fascinating to listen to that. She recorded another one in 2016 with Kirstie Young, but the first one was Roy Plumley, where she flirted outrageously with Rory Plumley all the way through. But there is a kind of, you do get that sense of she'd only written six books at that stage, but she's a fully formed.

She's a fully formed character. I mean, she is Jilly Cooper, to all intents and purposes, the Jilly, before she has written all the books that made her famous. And you know what she chose is the book, her Desert Island book? I do know. Go on. Yeah. It's Anthony Pohl. Ah. With whom she was very friendly, in fact.

And quotes occasionally in certainly in the journalism. I try to get hold of the copy of her 1980 book, Super Cooper. Yeah. So named because Super Trooper by Abba was in the charts at the time. So she had an eye. Who wants to read as something from Imogen? Well, I could read a bit. It's chosen pretty much around.

I chose my bits, Cathy. Well, I forgot to do it, you see. Anyway, it goes something like this. Can I go to the Lou? said Imogen, who didn't want to, but was desperate to repair her face before Nikki could compare her any more with this ravishing creature. Down the passage on the left, said Cable, we'll be in here. Do you think five bikinis would be enough, Nikki? What price Lady Jays, moth-eaten red bathing dress?

now, thought Imogen savagely, as she combed the tangles out of her hair. Her face was all eyes in a for once pale face. She pinched some of Cables Rouge, but it made it look like a clown, so she rubbed it off again. She found Nicky and Cable in a room where everything seemed scarlet, carpet, curtains, and every inch of wall that wasn't covered by books and pictures. Even the piano was painted red, and in one corner stood a huge stuffed bear wearing a scarlet regimental jacket. it. Oh, what a heavenly room, sighed Imogen. Cable looked at her with a surprise. Do you think so?

Matt's taste, not mine. Detail. Detail. Bear and a regimental jacket. Bears do furnish a room. It's quite Henry Jamesian as well, I think, but there's so little about Cable, but you find out so much about her just. from her reaction and her sort of positioning against Imogen

and that putting something on and taking it off again being very evocative. Daisy, have you got a bit there that you would like to share with the room? I do. It stopped me if this is too long. James Edgeworth had the rosy complexion, puffed out cheeks and curly hair cherubs that blow the wind at the corner of old maps. He was small, plump and wore a yachting cap and a look of east. Eager expectancy. Let's have a drink, said Nicky.

Tomato juice for me, said Yvonne. Pitchie to waste it when it's duty-free, said Nicky, giving her one of his hard, sexy looks. Oh, well, if you twist my arm, I'll have a baby sham, said Avon. Everyone else had double brandies. You write for the papers, don't you? said Yvonne. Rather fun, I should think. I was rather good at English at school.

They all said I should take up writing. Matt looked at her. It would have been tragic to deprive the modelling world, he said dryly. Imogen suppressed a smile. That's what I thought, said Yvonne. Now I just write Jumbo's speeches. His speeches? Didn't you know, she bared her teeth like the wolf in Red Riding Hood?

James is a prospective candidate for Cockfosters. He's awfully busy at the moment. But if you ask him nicely, I'm sure he'd spare the time to give you an interview for your paper. I'll remember that, said Matt. Mind you, said Yvonne, I do think the articles you write are rather, well, exaggeration. In what way, said Matt, his eyes narrowing? Well, that piece last week on Northern Ireland. I mean, I didn't finish it.

And I know all journalists sensationalised things for the sake of circulation. Go on, said Matt, an ominous note creeping into his voice. It's just so bitchy. one doesn't exist. That is her journalism, giving a terrible person enough rope to hang themselves and doing that in the dialogue and the reactions. Again, it's a holiday we've all been on, you know, lump together with some people you quite like, and several people you really don't like. And I think Matt says that, doesn't he? You need that. And that's something I didn't appreciate as a teenage reader, but I do know a bit like Hindus, where there's always someone

who's the worst. And if you're, everyone seems quite nice. Oh, it's me. maybe I'm the worst. You say something in your article, Ian, that really interested me. Because it's her world and she's kind of controlling it, you know who the good people are. You have no choice but to like Imogen. Is that part of what you think makes it so successful? You know who the bad people are and you know who the good people are. But what you don't know is how they're going to interact.

I think that's right. And I think you don't know how the scenes are going to follow each other. You don't know who's going to go wrong, what's going to fall out of, a place. And even though you know it'll end happily, you don't. You are sitting on the edge of your seat, metaphorically at least, as you read through it. Because actually, I always feel quite comfortable reading her. I don't actually feel physically uncomfortable. But I do feel kind of mentally a bit agitated about how long this is going to go on until somebody sees that actually somebody they're in love with is in love with them and they're in love with them

which they haven't noticed. And that really... That's Austin, though, isn't it? It's Austin. It's Woodhouse as well. It's the way in which an imbroglio is created and then disentangled at Shakespeare, too. Not that I'm saying, you know, Cambridge Don,

so... You heard of Shakespeare. But you do say, now you do say in your piece, I think this is worth highlighting because I can see exactly what you mean here. There's certainly the later novels, because she's written, This is like a 12-volume Romance Fleur,

which she might not have intended to start writing, but the same characters recur over a number of decades, that it's ended up being like a Dickensian marshalling of... And certainly pole-like, you know? Yeah. We have a clip here of... This is from the Desert Island Discs, John, that you were talking about, the later Desert Islandis.

This is with Jilly telling us why she says. thinks these particular novels were the romance novel of the 70s were so successful. You began writing novels then in the 70s. I was one of those young teenagers who devoured them, names like Emily and Belia and Harriet and Octavia and Prudence and Imogen. I couldn't get enough of them. I wanted you to write more. At the time, why do you think they were successful? Because they flew off the shelves. I think they were successful because the men were lovely. I mean, the men were very, very attractive. A lot of Leo and men, but a lot of men I I think if you're going to be funny and have a glamorous hero at the end,

I think it gets people going. Now, Nikki's got her head in her hands after listening to that. See, Jilly thinks it's because of the lovely, lovely men and how they behaved so appallingly that you ladies just can't resist, Nick. Totally, Nick, you must love Matt, it's lovely Irish, kind of... Can we talk about the fact that Matt, who has presented as, oh, he's much older than the heroine and he's a bit rugged, and can he ever love him in and gin because he'd love before

and he's got long past and life of history, and he's 32. I know. This struck me quite as I was re-reading it yesterday. I've got a bit here. This is for me. This is my favourite short passage in this novel. And it brings together what I think

this unlikely combination that Jilly manages in the pros, right? So Imogen, it's near the start of the book and Imogen has been invited away on holiday by the tennis pro, Nicky Beresford. and he's written to her parents saying that nothing will have happened to your daughter, a deeply, deeply sinister man.

Anyway, so Imogen is packing for the holiday. It's worth saying, isn't it, that Imogen's father is a vicar? Yeah, very much so. She's naive, but she's no fool. On the eve of her holiday, the mauve packets of the pill was safely tucked into the pocket of her old school coat

hanging at the back of her wardrobe. She'd been taking it for eight days now, and she felt sick all the time, but she wasn't sure if it was side effects or nervousness at the thought of seeing Nicky. It was such ages since their last meeting, she felt she'd almost burnt herself out with longing. Then she was worried about the sex side. She'd been taking surrebitious glances at the joy of sex

when the library was quiet. And the whole thing seemed terribly complicated. Did one have to stop talking during the performance like a tennis match? And wouldn't Nicky accustomed to lithe, beautiful female tennis players find her much too fat. She put her hot forehead against the bathroom window. In the garden, she could see her father talking to the cat and staking some yellow dahlias beaten down by the rain and wind.

That's what I need, she thought wistfully. I'll never blossom properly in life unless I'm tied to a strong, sturdy steak. Now, hang on, whoa, whoa, hang on. She also packed a pile of big paperbacks. She'd never got round to reading. Daniel De Ronda. Lark rise to Candleford, Scott Fitzgerald, and Tristram Shandy. On the bed lay a box of tissues.

They don't have the kind of loo paper you can take your makeup off with in France, Miss Hockney had told her. A cellophane bag of cotton wool balls and a matching set of Goya's passport. She had won in the church fate raffle. Oh, I think this is the brilliance of... This is what's brilliant about Judy Cooper. This is exactly what my wife was saying about her message to her readers is be yourself. You can be silly and you can also take Tristram Shandy on holiday with you.

And we're shown that Imogen has a good go at reading Tristram Shandy before getting bored with it and then deciding she's going to read the Great Gatsby instead. So I think that's really, that seems to me a really positive message about the capabilities of, the girls she's writing about, you can do what you want. There is another message though. Which is? Imogen does not have any point in the story where Imogen isn't constantly thinking about a man. The only point where she's not thinking about a man is a very key plot point where she rescued a young boy.

But there is nothing in the story which is being passively led by a man. But I think that at the time, and even to an extent now, without wanting to sort of divulge too much personal information, someone who was, you know, my father isn't a vicar, but I was brought up by a very strict Catholic family. And I remember that sort of with my first boyfriend. Because like the bit I, the other part I was, I selected to read was when Imogen loses her pill. She's got the pit. And it's always the pill, isn't it? Not her pills. Her pill, singular. She's left them in a pocket and it gets given to the church jumble sale. And she has to rescue them. And there's a horrible nosy old lady and a kind lady who knows what's going on.

make sure she gets them back. But that, you know, being pushed and pulled, I think that she was a real, a social chronicler. And I think that it's interesting, perhaps even politically, Julie Cooper's writing at a time when women didn't feel as though, you know, their bodies belonged to anyone. They were either being controlled by their parents or being controlled by some man.

No non-straight people in Julie Cooper. A few tokenistic ones in the later book. they don't turn up here. I think there's a reference to being queer that's not in the 2019 woke sense. But my goodness, there is a lot that's problematic and tricky and infuriating and upsetting and difficult. But I think that it is worth remembering. She was a really, really brilliant observer of a time she was living in, which was really, really, really progressive in some ways, but also shockingly not progressive in others. I mean, the other thing I'd say, Nick, in response to what I think is perfectly

justifiable criticism is her heroines, to use the horrible phrase that we use now, have agency. She might be thinking about those things, but she does what she wants. You know, the will of the heroines is the thing that pushes out in the end. Can I talk about, have you read Harriet yet? So Harriet is, I think, perhaps, the book that's perhaps the most similar to Imogen. And because other books as well, they're heroines that are much, much, much, much spiky than Imogen. I love Imogen like I love Fanny Price and nobody loves Fanny Price.

Everybody thinks Fanny Price is really wet and pathetic. But as someone who often feels very wet and pathetic, I think that's my girl. Harriet is set at Oxford. Harriet is a student. She's beautiful. She's shy. I believe she's a virgin. She is seduced by Simon Ville.

Villiers, Villiers, Villiers, an actor who entrances everybody with his glamour and the fact that he's clearly going on to great things. And he fancies a crack at the, you know, the pretty shy girl who turns up to party. And Harriet gets pregnant. Simon wants nothing to do with it. Harriet sort of has the baby, even though everybody's desperate for her not to, leaves in shame and ends up as a nanny to a glamorous man. Can you guess what's going to happen? But something that really struck me about that, because much is made about the fact that Harriet really enjoys sex.

And it's something she's really choosing to do. And she's, for the first time in her life, sort of excited about something that isn't reading. And, oh, God, I mean, I don't think anyone would be upset if I'm pretty sure Jilly Cooper like sex a lot. And it seemed possibly not so much now. But, you know, for me at the time of the teenager, that seemed like a revolution.

And having the sort of sex education and I was lucky to be of an age when it was there, but it was very much, God, there is another De LaMoran joke that, you know, said the 60s being about free love and the Beatles and that's will have a good time. And the 80s was, don't fuck anyone, or you'll die.

Here's MC Hammer. It was very much my sex education in the late 90s early years. Here's everything can go wrong. Here's everything you'll be afraid of. all the bad things that could happen. And this old voice in my life that said, this is lovely. And something that most people do was Gilly Cooper.

Ian, how does Jilly Cooper's writing about sex compare with the writing of V.H. Lawrence about sex? Well, I'm almost indistinguishable, I think. In many ways. I don't think they are quite the same. I think Lawrence's writing about sex is, although there is a kind of lyricism, sometimes there's also an awful repetitiveness in the way he writes about it. He does just kind of keep on saying the same thing in different times.

Disfigured by his metaphysical concerns. Yes, it is a bit disfigured by his metaphysical. It's also disfigured a bit by his physical concerns and constrained somewhere. by the limitations on what he can say and get published. I suppose, woman bowels, loins, dark, dark. It's really hard work, I think, finding fun in Lawrence's depictions of fun in sex. I suppose one thinks most of Mellers and Connie in Lady Chattelie's lover, where it is really pedagogic rather than,

exciting. It's a lesson. I think I know what you're going to say here, whereas Jilly, it seems to me, is taking, Jilly is writing in an era where everything is freer. Well, that's certainly true. She is. And also, she's writing in an era where it's possible to think of it as a kind of exuberance. And it's an exuberant pleasure. It's bawdy in the, in the old, in the old sense. It's like the film of Tom Jones. I mean, yeah. I always think with her gap tooth, she has that wife of Bath kind of, you know, that she enjoyed. Oh, that's so funny. I have a friend, Duncan. Hello, Duncan. Who said exactly the same thing. But as a young man, he saw Jilly Cooper. At the time he was reading,

the Canterbury Tales at school. And Jilly and her Gap made quite a profound impression on him. But you know, we were talking earlier, but, you know, her life. still in her 80s, you know, when she meets a man, is to say, oh, how lovely to meet you. Gosh, you're good-looking. Do you want to go upstairs? I mean, we know that it's a joke, but she says, well, men don't have compliments paid to them terribly often.

As much as Lawrence, to be honest. I mean, if you're looking for solutions to metaphysical problems, Jilly Cooper may not be your writer. But what I do think that she does do, talking to women in the office, you know, who are at various levels, but broadly on the woke scale, mostly woke and quite articulate about that. They love Julie Cooper because they see her almost in mental health terms.

They find her immensely comforting. She has a positive moral message to make about the value of sex and about the value of relationships and the importance of kindness and the importance of love in relationships. And that to be in her world is a very comforting and reassuring. She's certainly, Tina was saying that she said she's a really good author to read at times of stress funnily enough what you were saying

you said i read these when i was doing my a levels i sort of would they were they were a release for me they were they were a place to go and sort of like woodhouse i mean i think like woodhouse exactly yeah yeah i've got a lovely little bit from one of her essays

for the sunday times but is she knows one of the other things is that she's now in her 80s 82 i think and so remembers the war and there's just a little bit about the celebrations at the end of the war. Perched on top was an effigy of Hitler with mad, staring eyes, slicked back hair, a little black moustache, and a swastika armband.

At last, the great pyre roared into golden flame. After 2,000 days of blackout, the brilliance was breathtaking. Birds disturbed by the unaccustomed brightness, sang their heads off. Insects freaked out, moths bashing against the lights, colossal maybugs bombing us like doodle bugs. Looking across the garden, my mother suddenly stiffened. for there was my father laughing and shoving his hand down a blonde's dress but it was only old lady Thornley again

this time her white hair was turned gold by the bonfire and my father was retrieving a maybug from her cleavage but it's classic Jilly Cooper you know focus pull she's very very very good comic writer I think there are some great one liners in Imogen my favourite was the one Tracy who is the really kind of

towy member of the cast has gone out with Nikki. And the line, I think, is delivered by Matt. Where's the pedalo? I hope Nikki hasn't sunk without tracing. Ian, you say in your essay about Jilly that the thing that you got from reading the books and we shouldn't underestimate this was pleasure.

What are the pleasures that you think Jilly gives to the reader which you wouldn't get from another writer? What is the thing in her work that is? is so much. I don't know that I go so far as to say there are no other writers that would provide similar pleasures, but I think I'm glad that John said comedy,

comic just now, because I think that comedy is a central element in pleasure because it has a happy ending. But I think that what she actually manages to provide is Not so much, though perhaps to some extent in the bonk-busters, guilty pleasures, the pleasures of finding things

that you wouldn't elsewhere be by and said. It's the pleasure of indulging fantasy and at the same time indulging it within quite strictly delimited scenarios, which are written in such a way as to ensure that you can take them seriously within their limits. And at the same time, it's full of jokes. To use the grim, or phrase, it's a safe space. Yes, it is. A Julie Cooper novel is a safe space.

Please, can we talk about parties because it's Jillie Cooper's fault that I think I like parties? This is your last word on the matter. So this is your final statement. Chili Hooper's parties are nearly always disastrous. And that is, I think, one of the pleasures of them because you have the fun of going to the party, but you don't have to go. And one of the I think that's great, my friends, Caroline O'Donoghue and Ella and Rez Bridget, both brilliant writers.

They, Caroline does a brilliant podcast, sentimental garbage, where they talk about commercial women's fiction. And they said the people complain constantly about the tropes in commercial women's fiction. All writing has tropes. you know, sort of thrillers have tropes. Science fiction has tropes. It's not, but people are sort of keen to spot them on these and what people think of the things.

Like, you know who the heroine is going to fall in love with. And, you know, but that's not, we know who by page 20. It's the how that we're interested in. But also, it's the, you know, the way people kind of eat and drink and those parties, there's a bit in prudence, I think, where there's a terribly glorious, the gorgeous, scatty mother has an impromptu party and everyone's having a terrible brandy cocktail and the taxman's turned up she doesn't know what to do with them and everyone's sort of really enjoying this patte and there

are lots of descriptions about you know goatey men shoveling food into their mouths and um i think they realize quite later on that it's like it's chappy or chum or you know they've been um they've served dog food up and everybody is just too pissed to notice and i think that we read jilly because because of who we hope to be and who we know. know we are and she makes both of those things not just okay but things to celebrate don't you just want to go and have supper around at jillies i mean isn't that the ultimate i had lunch with her with the rest of the jilly cooper i was going to say fan club book club definitely fan club and it was like christmas day and she was christmas and i sort of loved her more as a human than a writer

and i can't tell you how much i love her as a writer she was saying to ian radiant and i don't use that word lightly. Ian, there's that tally with your experience? It rather does. Yes. I mean, it was, I have fortunately had lunch with her a couple of times. And it's always a joy. She is just the most generous human being, witty, intelligent, kind, thoughtful, drunk.

It's... Yeah. This is Dr Ian Patterson with, let's say, a bit of a crush now. Well, it's true. So think on, Nikki. When I say drunk, darling, I don't mean drunk. I mean full of wine. Is there a difference?

Yes, my darling, because I've given up vodka in a pathetic attempt to be slightly more stover. That's exactly what I meant. I do that really has that in common with Escort Fitzgerald. Well, when characters are sort of working on their drinking and not wanting to be massive pisshead, they give up drink, but that doesn't include wine or beer. I would like listeners to make a list of all the writers that we would compare Julie Cooper to in this podcast. Bach, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Dickens.

And remember what Tracy said about Fitzgerald. She's quite good. Has she written anything else? It seems a shame being such a jolly super time that we're having to bring it to a close, but I must lashings of thanks to Daisy and Ian to our lovely producer and to our marvellously well-upholstered sponsor Unbound.

ah champagne you can download all 83 of our other shows plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading on our website backlisted.fm and of course you can still contact us on twitter facebook and boundless if you've had as much fun as we all have why not spill out indeed spilling out is a thing that happens in these books a lot why not spill out a star spangled review on iTunes or Spotify whatever else you cozy up to for oral content Thank you to Ian Patterson. Thank you. It was lovely to be here.

I've enjoyed it very much. Daisy Buchanan, thank you very much. It made me joyous as an otter. Yes, thanks awfully everybody. We've had the most marvellous evening. See you in a fortnight. Well done. Oh, that was just great.

That was fun. That was great. All right? Yeah. Great. And... ...their... ...their...

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