Therefore Bono had to adopt new personas in order to write songs for the record (what some people might call 'using the imagination', though Bono sounds as though he thinks he deserves a medal or something), as he explained to Q magazine.

"I'm bored of Bono and I am him - I'm sick of me. I felt it was a little limiting to be in the first person."

So therefore the song 'Tripoli' is written from the perspective of a French police officer - well, what else? And of course for the track 'Cedars of Lebanon' Bono adopts the alter-ego of a war correspondent. Nothing pretentious about that at all, is there?

Not that there's anything new in this. A small man with an over-simplistic view of world politics and an outrageously rampant and out of control ego? He's been writing songs as Napoleon for years.

by Ian McShane