The Sunday Times celebrates Twittersphere this week with its choice of the top 50 tweeters it suggests you might like to follow. It is a fairly British oriented list with a mix of celebrities, writers sports stars and quirky accounts.

It doesn’t feature many journalists, but of the few here three are Sunday Times writers including, of course,India Knight. No place for many rivals although PoliticsHome editor Paul Waugh makes an appearance and Sky News is the representative broadcaster of choice in a list that is light on TV.

Topping the Sunday Times list is Shaun of the Dead and Mission Impossible star Simon Pegg followed by a less obvious choice at number two with tech savvy Canadian writer Margaret Atwood author of The Handmaiden’s Tale.

There is only politician in the list and that is Twitter happy Conservative Louise Mensch who seems to be everywhere of late. No one else in parliament warrants an inclusion in the Sunday Times magazine list, which has a definite literary bent. Not only do we have Atwood, but Generation X and Microserfs author Douglas Coupland as well as @LarkinQuotes, Nail Gaiman and Hari Kunzru.

There are plenty of comedians as well here including as David Baddiel, who must have the most to the point Twitter bio: “Jew”, as well as Sarah Silverman and Stephen Mangan.

There is an extended list on its website, but that is behind the paywall and the paper hasn’t actually tweeted its own list, but then it hasn’t tweeted at all for five days.

Really if there was anything you weren’t going to put behind a paywall it would be social content like this.  As oddly the Sunday Times did give some content free away this week, as it has been doing occasionally, and offered open access to its Aaron Sorkin interview where the West Wing writer talks about his latest show ‘The Newsroom’, which starts on Sky Atlantic this week. Sadly Sorkin does not tweet.

As well as the list we get @piersmorgan sharing his A-list and his C-list Twitter favourites, which he uses partly as an excuse to stoke his ongoing feud with @Lord_Sugar who he places at the top of his C-List. His top five A-list followers are @GeorgeMichael, @BeefyBotham, @RickyGervais, @AlecBaldwin and @GaryLineker.

It also has a reminder of the top five Twitter users, which is a list dominated by women and gives you an indication what some people like most about Twitter is its seeming easy access to celebrity musings.

1. @LadyGaga (26,319,020)

2. @JustinBieber (24,066,004)

3. @KatyPerry (22,159,995)

4. @Rihanna (21,527,995)

5. @BritneySpears (18,098,874)

 The Sunday Times Top 50 List