Animals don't vote. The only room they don't like is the euthanasia room at a shelter. They are completely at the mercy of us, and they have no voice of their own. This event was about animal advocacy—something that has always been deeply personal to me. Anyone who knows me knows that protecting animals is one of my greatest passions.
Brigitte Bardot was a very carnal incarnation of the new, sexually liberated woman, wrote film critics in the 1950s and 60s. (I understand your main interest is animals, said a flustered BBC interviewer. No, replied Bardot, my main interest is sex.) That was how Bardot, who has died aged 91, was sold as a film star but, in truth, she could have been a character from a novel by Colette, whose subject was always l'amour love as a transaction, or a madness, seldom a liberation.
Jilly Cooper was a genuinely merry soul, with a gimlet eye and a determination to see the best in absolutely everything; even when her life was difficult, she brightened every room with her spaniel hair. What fun she had and shared with us, and what a wonderful legacy she left. It would be easier to count the novelists of my generation who didn't read her. Not just the world-conquering Riders
