Book description
Lady Annabel Goldsmith is a daughter of the 8th Marquess of
Londonderry. The family fortunes were based on coal-mining. In her
enthralling memoirs she told of her aristocratic upbringing with an
increasingly eccentric father, a Conservative MP with strong liberal
leanings, and a mother who died young from cancer. Her personal account
of marrying Mark Birley at 20, the creation of Annabel's Club in
Berkeley Square, and then her affair and later marriage to entrepreneur
Sir James Goldsmith, enthralled many readers. The club was a huge
success from the beginning and remains so into its fourth decade.
Annabel had three children with Goldsmith, including Jemima, Zac and
Ben, who married into the Rothschild family. But tragedy was never far
away: Rupert, her eldest son, died in an accident, and Goldsmith died
from cancer after financing a campaign of candidates opposed to the John
Major line on the EU at the 1997 general election. This book elegantly
describes, in intimate and perceptive essays, pen-portraits of some of
the extraordinary figures that entered the Birley and Goldsmith circles
- among them, Lord Lambton, Patrick Plunket, John Aspinall, Geoffrey
Keating, Lord Lucan, Dominic Elwes and Claus von Bulow. The richness of
the narrative is in the particular detail and observation which only a
true insider can record.
