#animal-advocacy

#animal-advocacy

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