Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

The analyst's psyche operates as a kind of... something to hold on to while somebody's going through therapy, if they're deconstructing their own psyche, if that's cracking up in some way, or dissolving.

Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.