Note: This site is still under construction (This is the DEVELOPMENT copy; see www.CliveJame.COM for the live site).To reach any of its four main areas, click on one of the squares grouped around the proprietor's face at top left. Once inside, you should find all the links to further levels on the right of the text. But if you are viewing on a small screen, be sure to scroll down on any introductory page to find the links below the text.

If only the web were the work of a single giant spider, we might teach it to behave. But the web is more like a jungle, and the most we can hope to do is make the occasional clearing, in which a civilized form of safety may be found. The visitor needs a refuge not just from nihilism, prurience and insanity, but from the meaningless, which is practically the web’s binding force even when it is providing necessary information. There have to be places where coherent expression can be found. After five years of work, I am at last ready to claim that this website might be one of them.

I would be less ready to say so if I were speaking only on my own behalf. I admit that the project started its career as a personal archive. But such has been the generosity of my guests in all media – a truly international cast, with more to come – that the steadily expanding principality would be of interest even if its instigator were to disappear from it tomorrow. So at last I can begin to be proud of it instead of apologetic.

Since the beginning, I have written and rewritten this opening paragraph several times, and it might have been thought from some of my terminology that I wasn’t being apologetic at all about what we were building. As well as a gizmo, a gadget and a contraption, I called it a bespoke pyramid, a space station, a free university campus, a café in Atlantis, an outpost of Arcadia, a crystal palace, a song of lights. But I was whistling to keep my courage up while the work went on. Now that the clearing’s outlines are harder to mistake, I can adopt the more modest tone that should be the true mark of confidence. Thousands of people from all over the world are coming to visit. I can give up saying that this is something new, and simply be glad that it feels new to them.