'Let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear before your eyes every day, especially death; and you will never have anything contemptible in your thoughts or crave anything excessively.' Epictetus, The Handbook.

Power, money and death seem to inhabit a world beyond the ken of everyday life, provoking horror and fascination in equal measure. Though we all might pine for a taste of wealth and omnipotence from time to time, the rich and powerful smack of evil, as if success stripped the over-ambitious of their souls. Saddam Hussein, Elvis Presley, Bill Gates and even Andy Warhol have all achieved some level of immortality, and for that they have become objects of both contempt and desire. A dictator, a rock star, an entrepreneur and an artist make a strange group, but all of these guys seem to have licked life's great inevitable, and that makes them both obscene and irresistible. It's an illusion, of course – everyone's the same heap of worm-nibbled bones in the end. Yet religion and celebrity have a knack of generating great piles of gold and power because we have never learned to cope with our own mortality.