Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.