From racy riders to romantic rivals: Jilly Cooper’s best books – ranked!

The second series of Rivals has put the bestselling author’s brand of saucy jollity back on screen, but what is her bonkbuster nonpareil? In the last of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles – her epic, engrossing sagas of bucolic life among horse-riding poshos – Rupert Campbell-Black, template-handsome cad turned loving husband, is now (I did the maths) 67. Taggie has cancer, which is bracing, since the Chronicles as a whole rarely brush with mortality. I was astonished to learn that Cooper did 15