“Cashmere, wool and nylon mix,” says Barbara Taylor Bradford. “The pure cashmere ones wear out too fast.” Bed socks – and their importance within a marriage – are a recurring theme in my encounters with the best-selling British novelist. We discussed them four years ago, in her 5,000 square foot Manhattan penthouse, and we’re back on them today, in the rarefied glow of the Dorchester tearooms.

Robert – Taylor Bradford’s American film producer husband of 54 years – was always complaining about cold feet, until the woman he calls ‘Napoleon’ made him wear bed socks. “And now he’s grown into them,” she shrugs. “It’s about mothering men without them knowing they’re being mothered.”

Were Taylor Bradford’s new book to be called On Marriage rather than Secrets of Cavendon, it would doubtless sell as many copies as the previous 31 (just the 92 million worldwide) and possibly break the records of her first, A Woman of Substance, which has sold over 30 million copies since it was first published in 1979, and is one of the ten best-selling novels of all time.

How the Leeds-born author manages to bash out an international bestseller every year is the subject of as much wonder as her blissfully happy marriage. I’m going to need to know her secrets.