It's not often that I get to correct a political pundit, but it's not often that political pundits venture into the realm of literary quotation.
Yesterday on Fresh Air, Vanity Fair's political correspondent Todd Purdum said, in reference to some politician, "for those who like that sort of thing it's just the sort of thing they like," and attributed the line to Oscar Wilde.
He was close, closer than the people who cite Abraham Lincoln as the source. It was actually Wilde's contemporary - and caricaturist - Max Beerbohm, one of the wittiest, most elegant and most overlooked writers in English literature.
