Her upper lip plumped up. Permanently puckering. Ever-ready for sex or stimulated by food or bruised, or – most likely – fluffed and buffed by the collagen of publicity.

Nigella Lawson: buffeted by the break-up of her marriage to Charles Saatchi; embarrassed by salacious evidence given during the trial of the Grillo sisters (former personal assistants whose successful defence against fraud charges rested on discrediting Nigella as a prosecution witness).

Not Grotto or anything like it, but the Grillos are dunnos when it comes to inflating themselves; whereas Nigella must always have known (with a name like ‘Nigella’, perhaps she always had to). In the tilt of her chin and the set of her mouth as she is seen going into court, the domestic goddess keeps faith with self-promotion (requiring tireless dedication to the sacred cause).

Motto: manifesto ergo sum; manifesto ergo ego.

Meanwhile on the BBC Radio Four Today programme, with pencil-thin lips (drawn on like a second moustache in the midst of his clerical beard) Anjem Choudary will not condemn the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, butchered on a London street in May. Choudary will not enter into the personal domain where normal persons are seen to have acceptable feelings, because he is there to promote the Not-I, the annihilation of self. How I feel is not the most important thing, he insists. Compared to Islam, he seems to be saying, we are nothing. And for saying this, he is pleased to receive plenty of attention.

Manifesto ergo non sum; manifesto ergo non ego.

The negatives cancel each other out. Nigella and Anjem are mirror images of each other: posing and deposing the supremacy of self; in their opposite ways, both equally selfish.