All eyes are now on Donald J. Trump’s impending inauguration, which takes place in Washington DC, on January 20, and whose centrepiece is the inaugural address. But despite the attention lavished on these speeches by aides, speechwriters, newspaper columnists and pundits, few of them earn a place in history.
There are, of course, some magnificent exceptions. Think of Abraham Lincoln’s (futile) 1861 appeal to “the better angels of our nature”, or his pledge, in his second inaugural, to act “with malice toward none, with charity
