“You can’t flirt any more. We used to have so much more fun!”

Dame Jilly Cooper, 87, looks back with nostalgia to her heyday towards the end of the last century. So do the many fans of her stories in print, audiobooks and on screen.

Rivals, Disney’s dramatisation of her 1988 “bonkbuster”, set in the fictional Cotswolds county of Rutshire, has been one of the TV hits of the year on both sides of the Atlantic.

A second series was commissioned. Cooper says she is “orgasmic with…