Name the American First Lady who declared, "I loathe the French."

1. Laura Bush.
2. Hillary Clinton.
3. Nancy Reagan.
4. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

HINT: This was not supposed to part of the public record--yet.

The answer is after the JUMP. 

“History is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.”
 
C.V. Wedgwood 

​The events of the past seem so obvious, so easily predictable when reviewed from the vantage point of the present. To take from the past all the lessons it has to offer, however, means forgetting for a moment its eventual outcome. Retrospective histories do not permit this. One book that avoids this paradox is The Mitfords, Letters Between Six Sisters. This collection of correspondence of the six lively and intelligent Mitford sisters begins in 1925 and does not conclude until the first decade of the 21st Century. All six were gifted writers with distinct points of view. Moreover, they were on intimate terms with Churchill, Kennedy, and a great many others who gave form to the 20th Century. Their letters reveal history as it occurs, in real time, and offer extraordinary perspective on how we might better live our lives today. 

Image Credit: The Mitford Family Album

“Funny, isn’t it, what little gratitude you find among the lower classes these days?”
 
Compton Mackenzie, Rich Relatives

Compton Mackenzie excelled at social satire. His novel The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett  is better known, but Rich Relatives, from which the above quote is taken, is divine. 

Image Credit: Society in Vogue

“Fashion is the union of two opposites, which together form a compulsion: on the one hand, to be different, on the other, to subscribe to a common mean.”
 
Philip Core, The Original Eye

Image Credit: A.L.T. 365 by André Leon Talley

“Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone.”
 
Hedda Hopper, From Under My  Hat

Image Credit: Happy Times

“I thought people in New York were detached but they really care. In Paris it’s great. They are detached. They laugh at you. I thought that maybe they didn’t know anything but now I think they know everything.”
 
Andy Warhol, The Sixties: A Decade in Vogue

Image Credit: Warhol by Makos

“Nothing is tragic to a socialite.”
 
Anonymous, via Palm Beach, The Place, The People, Its Pleasures and Palaces

Image Credit: Delempicka.org

“What is more dull than a discreet diary? One might just as well have a discreet soul.”
 
Sir Henry "Chips" Channon, via The Financial Times

Image Credit: Chips, The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon

“Hollywood, like New York, is all about work. The glamour is the myth.”
 
Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles

Image Credit: A Wonderful Time

“Nothing shows the vanity of human beings so much as the belief that the universe was created solely for them, and that what does not please them is therefore wrong.”
 
A. Morse Hastings, Blondes Prefer Gentlemen