Snipples wot I found via Facebook today

[oursin]

Rather small and possibly not terribly representative poll of academics rates Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who established the National Health Service, [as] the most successful prime minister since 1945, with a rating of 8.1 out of 10. Yay Clem! I am also intrigued to see that Harold Wilson is rated at exactly the same level as Winston Churchill

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How disappointing is this? The Kinsey Institute Shop - I went to the Kinsey Institute and all I got was this lousy t-shirt (even if it does offer a choice of Kinsey scale numbers). You'd think they could at least manage some replicas of these vintage items, wouldn't you?

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Tate Work of The Week. Could they not ask a less banal question than 'Do you love William Blake and why'?

Comments

[rahael]

apparently only Churchill's post war term in office was considered, hence him tying with Wilson. But I was also delighted that Attlee came top!

Wiki tells me he won a similar academic poll in 2004 - as best 20th century prime minister. It also tells me that Thatcher also admired him.

[laughingrat]

That's so restrictive. What if you only love William, not LOVE him? What if you kinda like him, but are skeeved out by those (untrue?) legends that he tied his wife to a chair and forced her to do automatic writing, which he then took credit for? (Did that happen?) What if you'd read his poetry, but wouldn't invite him out for sandwiches?

[oursin]

I'm pretty sure it was Yeats who got his wife to do automatic writing - Blake got his wife to play Adam and Eve in the garden with him (or at least, sit in the garden with him naked).

I'm not sure I'd say my feelings for WB were love, especially as there are times when his work is not dissimilar from the stream of consciousness emerging from a derelict homeless person clutching a can of something alcoholic lurching along the Embankment.