scrapes and japes of nob culture." Lorne Jackson of the Sunday Mercury was totally dismissive of what he called "a dull memoir", stating: "This could have all been explained in one page, possibly two if the type was particularly large." The Sunday Times commented that, "Annabel comes across as a decent woman ... but her writing is flat, with a few too many clumsy constructions, and her story lacks drama, even when terrible things happen to her." Biographer Selina Hastings called it "a well-ordered, decently written book," while the Evening Standard wrote, "Goldsmith herself comes across as fun and warm, a good sport, if sometimes strangely submissive and a little overfond of her own breasts." Annabel became a No.1 London best-seller for non-fiction. Nationally, the memoirs reached the top ten non-fiction best-sellers in England, fluctuating from No. 7 to No. 4 and then No. 6. She followed her autobiography, two years later in September 2006, by ghost-writing her pet dog Copper's autobiography in the name of Copper: A Dog's Life. Her daughter India Jane illustrated the book. Copper was originally bought by the Goldsmiths as a reward to their daughter Jemima for passing her Common Entrance Examination, but he remained in Lady Annabel's care for most of his life and had an adventurous time in Richmond. "Amid tough competition, he was probably the greatest character I ever knew", she told The Daily Telegraph. The mongrel, who died in 1998, was famed for travelling by bus, chasing joggers and visiting a Richmond pub, the Dysart Arms. Her literary efforts originated after the experience, according to her, of a life-defining moment on 29 December 2000. She, her son Benjamin, daughter Jemima and her two sons, plus her niece Lady Cosima Somerset and her two children were travelling to Kenya, when a passenger on their British Airways plane stormed into the cockpit and tried to seize the controls. The autopilot on the flight to Nairobi became temporarily disengaged and the jumbo was knocked off course, abruptly diving and plunging below. "Nobody on that plane thought, 'am I going to die?'" she later recalled. "They all thought, 'we are going to die'. It was horrible, horrible." This near-death incident has been credited by Lady Annabel as the catalyst for her writings. "I had always thought that I would write a book", she claimed, "but writing my memoirs didn't really come into my head until