Best Books About…Horses | Daily mail online

It’s Royal Ascot Week, the first with a new monarch at the helm. Reportedly, although King Charles was an avid horseman, he did not inherit his mother’s passion for horse racing. Camilla, however, is more enthusiastic. Royal guards promise that the Windsors will be in effect. Animal rights protesters could be, too.

Could jockey-sized Prime Minister Rishi Sunak score an invite to the Royal Box? One of the more surprising Westminster revelations in recent months was that Sunak is a huge Jilly Cooper fan. Apparently, the Sloaney author’s steamy rom-coms provide escape from his own busy life in the saddle.

Last month, he listed his favorites as “Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, and Appassionata.” My favorite is Prudence, but I remember falling head over heels into Riders as a schoolgirl. It famously follows the sporting and sexual rivalry of show jumpers Rupert Campbell-Black and Jake Lovell, one an arrogant kitty, the other a scion of Roma descent. Like all of Cooper’s reading, it peppers the filth with laugh-out-loud humour.

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy was published in 1992, while Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was written in 1877

At the other end of the literary spectrum is probably All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, the great American novelist who died last week. The first in his Border Trilogy, this follows two young Texans to Mexico to work as cowboys. Obituaries last week wrote of the violence of McCarthy’s vision, but his novels are also full of muscular lyricism in their evocation of landscape, brotherhood and the relationship between horse and rider.

The first novel I ever loved about horses and riding was Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s 1877 classic, written as an autobiography from the horse’s perspective. It was also a childhood favorite of Queen Camilla, who, like me, is haunted by the scene where the once vivacious Ginger is glimpsed on her way to the knacker’s yard. “Every time I think of poor old Ginger with her head out of the cart, it makes me cry,” she said in 2021.

Black Beauty had an impact on animal welfare. I hope this week’s race goers, riders and horses, have a safe and successful Ascot week.