Stirrings of lust and a ginger bush: the Jilly Cooper sentence that sent me down a rabbit hole

“Wondering if she had a ginger bush, he felt the stirrings of lust.” It’s an electrifying sentence, penned by – who else? – the English novelist Dame Jilly Cooper in her 1985 novel Riders, appearing during a charged encounter between a flame-haired socialite and bad-boy aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black.It’s a sentence I admire for many reasons. Starting in a ruminative, almost philosophical mood, it gains a thrilling momentum, before landing with erotic authority on that final, unholy syllable: lust. Impeccable stuff; classic Cooper. If you’ve watched Rivals, the recent TV adaptation of other Cooper books, you’ll be familiar with her world: puerile, horsey, abundantly filthy and terribly English.The Theory of Everything by Yumna Kassab review – this kaleidoscopic experiment is a delightRead moreI like to imagine the author on her estate in Gloucestershire in the moments she wrote these inspiring 13 words: pounding the keys of her typewriter in a ferocious sexual trance, nostrils aflare...