My first love was called Luke. He was an American polo player who liked to quote Robert Frost.

He existed in a book published in 1992. If you don’t believe me, you can’t have been a teenager in thrall to the storytelling of Jilly Cooper CBE in the Eighties and Nineties.

Her novels, including Riders , Rivals, and Polo, were the backdrop of my formative years. I wanted to fold myself into the pages and inhabit this fictional landscape where women were “ravishing”, everyone was accomplished, every orgasm ecstatic, bad people got their just deserts and love always won. I fell hard for Cooper. Some 25 years later, I’m still devoted and her most recent novel, Tackle!, published in 2023, which explores the world of football, offered the same wit and forensic, biting detail she was famous fo

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