British author Jilly Cooper has praised Irish men as being 'incredibly sexy'.

She says it is all about our 'peat-soft voices', and that her 'Irish hero' is the character of Viking O'Neill.

She told The Hard Shoulder: "I wrote a book about an orchestra - Viking O'Neill is my Irish hero - and he's absolutely divine.

"Everybody fancies him and he's very, very funny and he has a peat-soft voice like you."

"He's funny too - somebody says to him 'Do you work out?', cause he's got a marvelous body, and he says 'Only how to get my next lay'".

Admitting that there is a lot of naughtiness in her books, she said: "I think so, yes - I'm so old now I've forgotten how to do it, that's the awful thing".

Jilly also has links to Ireland, through her adopted daughter Emily who was born here.

"She's absolutely beautiful - she has blue, blue eyes and she just is very, very Irish and she's a make-up artist.

"When I have to go to important parties she sort of dechromes me and makes me look amazing.

"I love Ireland because of her a lot".

"I remember my Irish Emily was so sweet because her friends' parents were having a row, fighting all the time, and she said 'Why don't you borrow my daddy - he's got so much nicer since he changed his job'".

'The autumn's been amazing'

Jilly says she was last in Ireland when writing her book 'Mount', released in 2016.

"I spent a lot of time there, I was interviewing in Coolmore Aidan O'Brien and William Mullins.

"I shook hooves with Galileo, who's the greatest stallion in the world - he was such a friendly horse".

Asked how she is handling lockdown, she said: "One looks out of a window more so - the autumn's been amazing."

"I'm trying to write a novel about football so it's made me stay at home a bit more - I haven't been out since March.

"And because people can't hug anymore, nobody can hug me to see if I've put on any weight which is really nice too".

Her new book, 'Between the Covers' looks back on her career.

'A very joyful book'

On the new book, Jilly said: "It's sort of a funny book, it was a very joyful book for me.

"I suddenly got given a column in The Sunday Times, I wrote a piece about being a young wife in the colour mag and they liked it".

"And so Harry Evans gave me a column in The Sunday Times - a Fulham housewife becomes a Sunday Times columnist - so these are the sort of best columns from sort of the 70s and 80s, the 70s really, but it was a very wild time.

"All sorts of things, very different from now".

"All I minded about was when I got middle-aged - 30 - would I be able to go on attracting the opposite sex.

"All we thought about was sex and drinking, it was extraordinary".

On putting the new book together, she said: "It's lovely sort of recreating the whole past and I enjoyed doing it.

"And it was such a happy time".

"I was a terrible housewife and I had terrible dinner parties, so I just celebrated all these disasters and it was OK, really".

    

Her first big novel, 'Riders', was published in 1985 and went straight to number one in the bestseller lists - as did 'Rivals' published in 1988.

'Riders' was also her first novel to be adapted for a major two part mini-series for television.

In March 1997, her offering 'The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous' was shown on ITV.

Her books have sold over 11 million copies in the UK alone - and have been translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Greek, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian and Lithuanian.