5 thoughts on “Not so happily ever after”

  1. @Dave – I read that somewhere, I think. Didn’t they have, like, a general dislike for each other, and there was some sort of public showdown where this occurred?

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  2. Kate, I’d always heard the samee thing, but found this reference on winstonchurchill.org:

    —1920s. Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert said this exchange was more likely to have occurred between Lady Astor and Churchill’s good friend F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, a notorious acerbic wit. But both Consuelo Vanderbilt(The Glitter and the Gold) and Christopher Sykes(Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor) say the riposte was by Churchill. The argument was rendered moot when FredShapiro, in The Yale Book of Quotations, tracked the origins of the phrase to a joke line from a 1900 edition of The Chicago Tribune.

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