WHAT BOOK would Jilly Cooper take to a desert island?

• Writer Jilly Cooper would take the Oxford Book Of Quotations to a desert island
• READ MORE:  WHAT BOOK would writer and producer Terry Hayes take to a desert island?

…are you reading now?

I am utterly adoring a marvellous biography: The Maverick, George Weidenfeld And The Golden Age Of Publishing. In it, author Thomas Harding has brought a great publisher and the shenanigans of the book trade gloriously to life.

Escaping the Nazis, Weidenfeld set up in London where he lavishly entertained and bedazzled celebs and literary megastars to write books for him and rich backers to finance him. 

Many of the books, Lolita by Nabokov and The Group by Mary McCarthy were huge successes, but the autobiography of rockstar Mick Jagger, despite the coaxing of numerous ghost writers, never reached publication.

Married four times, a serial flirt and party animal, Weidenfeld was less kind to his female staff. When one editor begged for a raise, he merely suggested she ask her father to up her allowance.

…would you take to a desert island?

I’d certainly take the miraculous Oxford Book Of Quotations, so I could ward off loneliness by devouring my favourite authors. 

Poet John Donne is so touching: ‘The day breaks not, it is my heart’ and I’d be cheered up by all the jokes from Punch, and Proust’s Duc de Guermantes hilariously refusing unwanted invitations with the words, ‘Impossible to come, lie follows’.

…first gave you the reading bug?

Besotted by animals from an early age, I doted on the Beatrix Potter books, particularly naughty Tom Kitten, who was bursting out of his pale blue jacket, and his even naughtier sisters, who when they should have been tucked up in bed asleep, crept out and gloriously roughed up their mother’s four-poster.

Later, I progressed to pony books, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and The Maltese Cat, Rudyard Kipling’s magical tale about the finals of a polo tournament in India, a David against a mighty Goliath contest in which the ponies seem even more human than their riders.

…left you cold?

How To Clean Your House And Tidy Up Your Life by Lynsey Crombie, Channel 4’s Queen of Clean, somehow found its way on to my bookshelves.

Two hundred pages of tips on housework include deodorising the fridge, brightening car headlights with toothpaste, using cotton buds to clean between the buttons on your remote control and putting a pair of tights over the nozzle of your hoover to dust artificial flowers.

Sunday mornings are set aside for Lynsey, a glamourous blonde, and her husband to ‘deep clean’ their house. My lovely late husband Leo and I had far more fun things to do on a Sunday morning...

A passionate declutterer, Lynsey also urges chucking away any book you won’t read again. I’m afraid How To Clean Your House would top my list.

• Tackle! by Jilly Cooper is out now (Bantam, £22).