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“... Committee, which he did, though giving him an equally responsible role. Jonathan Steele and Eric Abraham characterised Chernenko as a ‘classic apparatchik’ who was ‘nothing but a Brezhnev associate’. But they also noted signs of his ‘continuing power’, and in particular the possibility that his being given the important task of making ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... between policies of the Bush Administration since 11 September and the way the Government under Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis of the Civil War in the 1860s. Both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow. In both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without ...”

“... slavery divided political leaders before the Civil War and has bedevilled historians ever since. Abraham Lincoln, who revered the Constitution, always insisted the founders intended to set slavery ‘in the course of ultimate extinction’. Nothing in the document, Lincoln argued, looked on slavery as a permanent part of American life. Southern leaders like ...”

“... belief but actual ‘religious events’. In fact, many of the founding fathers, as well as Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, were indifferent churchgoers. Their religion was deism rather than devout Christianity. Johnson has a hard time explaining why a nation ‘founded primarily for religious purposes’ has a Constitution that is a ...”

“... from his pictures on the walls and hoardings, pictures that make him a target for killers. This is Abraham Lincoln, the newly-elected President, come to Washington to take over from Buchanan and become a warlord. The little sharp-eyed man at Lincoln’s flank, with a derringer bulging in his pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard ...”

“... problem was his failure to rise to the challenge of Reconstruction after the Civil War.When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, Johnson, the vice president, succeeded him. Like his predecessor, Johnson started out at the bottom of the social ladder. As a young man he was an indentured servant. But while in Lincoln early deprivation sparked ...”

“... Jack Goody’s attributing to cuneiform writing the deployment of lists and linear thinking; Eric Havelock’s locating the source of Greek abstract thought and Plato’s ideal forms in the advent of writing; Richard Seaford’s rooting of these features in the monetisation of Greek society; and of course Marshall McLuhan’s celebration of the ...”

“... alone to manage their affairs, including ownership of slaves, without national interference. When Abraham Lincoln, who had pledged to halt the westward expansion of slavery, was elected president in 1860, they doubled down on the idea that the national government was their enemy and moved to create a new nation, a slave owners’ republic. In the end, the ...”

“... in the popular vote. This is what happened in the momentous four-candidate election of 1860. Abraham Lincoln received virtually no popular votes in the slave states and only 40 per cent nationally. But by carrying the entire North, he captured an electoral vote majority. Indeed, if the popular votes of the other candidates had been combined and given to ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted ...”

“... Americans were employed from the start as labourers in Civil War army camps. But Abraham Lincoln waited until almost two years into the war to authorise the enlistment of Black combat soldiers. (This was one provision of the Emancipation Proclamation.) Some 200,000 Black men had served in the Union army and navy by the end of the ...”

“... story goes. New versions of this cross-generational vaulting circulate now and then: a man who saw Abraham Lincoln being shot in 1865 was on a TV show in 1956; a retired friend in Canada recalls her now deceased Hungarian friend Dorothy telling her that her mother had been walking in the park at the age of four with her mother when the Emperor Franz Joseph ...”

“... Nietzsche, Joyce, Karen Blixen, van Gogh. Hayden reminds us, too, that politicians – Hitler, Abraham Lincoln and his wife – can, like anyone else, catch sexually transmitted diseases. Her approach is profitable and her choice of sufferers sensible: many of them left records of their views – and fears – about syphilis and its effects on their ...”

“... life when the reception of 1984 both impressed and worried him. Frankly I do not think that the ‘Eric Blair/George Orwell’ disjunction need trouble one greatly. Even Stansky and Abrams had dropped it by their second volume: I think their idea of a character change when he adopted the pseudonym was more of a formal excuse for not writing about ‘George ...”