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BOOK OF THE DAY: No Invitation Required: the Pelham Cottage YearsBy Annabel Goldsmith Leidenfeld Nicolson 177pp, £16.99
LADY ANNABEL Goldsmith, an indefatigably sociable daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry, must be London’s most benign high-fashion memoirist. Everyone portrayed in this slender volume of fluffy reminiscences “adored” everyone else – an all-star cast of adorables, including John Aspinall, “Aspers,” the gambling impresario and zoo-keeper; Patrick Plunket, an equerry to Queen Elizabeth (“He adored her from the outset.”); Geoffrey Keating, “witty, clever, charming” son of Matthew Keating, the first Irishman elected to the House of Commons; Claus von Bulow, “Clausikins,” the Danish aristocrat who was tried twice for murdering his wife and exonerated the second time; Lord Tony Lambton, the scandalous “Casanova of his time”; and Sir David Frost, of whom she writes: “The idea of August in Spain without the Frosts is unthinkable.”
