The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

Skinny is only one body type.

I think it is one of the capacities of human beings, to create style.

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.

When they took TV to Fiji they found that after 3 years nearly 12 girls out of 100 were over the toilet bowls with bulimia because they felt inferior.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: 'It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found'.