worked as a successful playwright in Paris before entering the Foreign Office. Vansittart always explained his Francophilia and Germanophobia under the grounds that as young man living in Europe the French were always kind to him while the Germans were cruel. The British Army officer and Conservative MP General Sir Edward Spears was a Francophile who as a fluent French-speaker served as a liaison officer between the French and British armies in both world wars. Spears was also an opponent of appeasement who founded the Anglo-French Parliamentary Association to bring together like-minded members of the French National Assembly and the British Parliament. Sir Winston Churchill was a Francophile who often expressed his admiration for France though the French historian François Kersaudy noted that Churchill's attempts to speak French usually left the French very confused as to what he was trying to say as Churchill's French was atrocious. Churchill often spoke of his love of the French, writing that Marshal Foch represented one aspect of France, "...the France, whose grace and culture, whose etiquette and ceremonial have bestowed its gifts around the world. There was the France of chivalry, the France of Versailles and above all, the France of Joan of Arc". Kersaudy called Churchill France's most "forceful and vocal champion" in interwar Britain, a time when many people saw the Treaty of Versailles as a vindictive, French-engineered treaty which was too harsh towards Germany, and accordingly Francophobia flourished among circles in Britain in favor of revising Versailles to remove some of the restrictions placed upon the Weimar Republic. It was frequently observed of Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Francophile Foreign Secretary 1924-29 that he "loved France like a woman, for her defects and her qualities", an aspect of his personality that Chamberlain was often attacked for. The Conservative MP Alfred Duff Cooper was in the words of the historian P.H Bell such a "devoted Francophile" that his time as British ambassador to France that he often tried the patience of the Foreign Office by going well beyond his instructions to maintain good relations with France by trying to create an Anglo-French alliance that would dominate post-war Europe. Bell also called Sir Anthony Eden a strong "Francophile" noted for his efforts as Foreign Secretary to reviving France as a great power during World War II. The novelist Nancy Mitford was a great Francophile who lived in Paris from 1946 until her death