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.

From a child's point of view, there is rarely a great time for parents to separate, even if there has been a lot of commotion and fighting.

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.

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

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.

Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.