Writer JG Ballard died yesterday aged 78 of prostate cancer. “Despite being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006,” Chris Watt reports in the UK Herald “he kept well enough to pen an autobiography, Miracles of Life, in 2008.” BBC –putting his obituary in the entertainment section –pointlessly bowdlerizes the nature of Ballard’s illness, claiming “His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill ‘for several years’ . . . .” Ballard made no secret of prostate cancer. Others have claimed that he began Miracles of Life because of it.