Yesterday, I cited Oscar Wilde in attributing the phrase, "When you think you’ve solved the Irish question, the Irish change the question." A reader emailed to say he thought it was Disraeli. It has the kind of wit that both men might have deployed. A little Googling, however, reveals a more recent origin:
It surfaced first in Sellar and Yeatman’s humorous book on British history 1066 and All That first published in 1930. What they actually wrote was ‘Gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question.’
Funnier.
The Dish 