​James Wilson

Cultural links

• Clive James' website has a great archive of his material.

• Letters of Note is now deservedly a great success. 

• Old pictures is a superb resource of old photographs.  So is the Albert Kahn site.

• Among modern photographers, I would recommend Anne-Marie Forker, who took the photograph for the cover of my book Cases, Causes & Controversies. As well as being very talented, she is outstanding to work with. 

• The Spectator Archive is a great political and cultural historical archive.  

• QI's website is, well, quite interesting.  The programme has been of pretty variable quality for most of its existence.  At its best it is highly entertaining; at its worst it is highly irritating - and sometimes wrong.  

• The other QI is also quite interesting - a site dedicated to great quotations and their provenance.  It is called 'quote investigator' and I suspect they are a bit gutted the English programme will have stolen much of their thunder or at least their traffic.  But it's still a good site - found here.

• In a similar mould to both QI sites, Snopes.com is a good debunker of urban legends, though like all such sites it has its inevitable biases.

• I enjoy cinema.  As well as the imdb, a good general site is filmsite. My friend Simon Clarke has created a fansite for his favourite film, Once Upon A Time In America.  If like me you are a fan of Stanley Kubrick, there is a dedicated site here in addition to the Warner Bros Kubrick site and this archive. A good place to start is the Rolling Stone interview from 1987. 

• Another good film site is selfstyledsiren - recommended by many authoritative writers too, so don't just take my word for it. Roger Ebert's site is still being maintained by others after Ebert's death, though the reviews are generally not of the same quality as Ebert's own, sadly if predictably.  But still one thumbs up at least, in Ebert parlance.  This site is also worth a look. 

• I have found people either enjoy Vivian Stanshall or they don't.  Those who do will probably already know of the Ginger Geezer website.  I like the fact the Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band was formed two streets away from where I used to live in Dulwich. The lack of a Blue Plaque on the house in question is a regrettable oversight by those responsible for such things. Incidentally both Tony Blair's slogan 'Cool Britannia' and the name of the band 'Death Cab for Cutie' were taken from titles of Bonzo Dog songs. I imagine Stanshall would be at least half pleased with that.  One of his last songs was called 'No Matter Who You Vote For, the Government Always Gets In'. 

• My friend Dr Simon Clarke teaches political philosophy - he has an interesting collection of newspaper articles on his site as well. 

​

• For First World War buffs, the Great War Forum is an excellent meeting place for like-minded sorts. 

​

​

​