The highs and lows of nob culture

Annabel Goldsmith very quickly learned when she married her long time lover Sir James that in doing so, she created a vacancy...

And it wasn't something she took too kindly. In fact, it brought her up with a jolt realising that the pain she had been dishing out to the old wife in Paris, was thrown back in her face when when he took a new mistress in New York.

An unconventional life? More silver spooned.

The daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, Annabel had a privileged upbringing winging her way between the childhood family homes of Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland and Wynyard Park near Stockton-on-Tees.

At the age of 19 she married Mark Birley and life became even better. There were glamorous parties, exotic holidays, three children and the London nightclub for which she will forever be associated - Annabel's "the coolest, hippest, sexiest, most sophisticated and glamorous in town".

Though Birley founded the club in her name and clearly provided the lifestyle to which she had always been accustomed, it wasn't enough.

Annabel's affair with the flamboyant billionaire tycoon James Goldsmith began in 1964, and by the time they married in 1978, they had two children.

This is a decidedly funny memoir that includes the scrapes and japes of nob culture. Arrested in Turkey for disorderly behaviour; peeing "helpless with laughter" into a pair of priceless china bowls at a party in Brighton Pavilion; her father decorating a Christmas tree with condoms.

But disaster, too, lurks very close to the surface. Her mother died from cancer of the mouth and her father, unable to cope, then took to drink.

In 1986, her eldest son Rupert mysteriously disappeared off the West Coast of Africa, Goldsmith died of pancreatic cancer in 1997 and then there was the terrifying ordeal in December 2000, when flying to Naorobi with her daughter Jemima Khan and youngest son Ben, a deranged student seized control of the Boeing 747.

It's a candid autobiography and a jolly read.

David Chapman