The many biographers and curators pumping out material on Abraham Lincoln must be congratulating themselves on truly extraordinary timing. Not only is next month the 200th anniversary of the log-cabin birth of the Great Emancipator, but Barack Obama will also conspicuously carry the banner of his Illinois forebear into the White House on January 20th.

Mr Obama has asked to take his oath on the same Bible that Lincoln used at his 1861 swearing-in (pictured above). Other parallels are so persistent as to become almost tiresome. Mr Obama and Lincoln were both politician-lawyers from Springfield who outfoxed heavily favoured New York opponents during the party primaries, namely William Seward (then a senator from New York) and Hillary Clinton. Both owed their rise to masterful oratory; both brought (or bring) thin governing experience to the presidency.

To read any biography of Lincoln in the present context is a rich experience. Mr Obama is known to favour “Team of Rivals”, Doris Kearns Goodwin's absorbing 2005 account of how Lincoln swept his political challengers into his cabinet. (Seward ended up as secretary of state, as presumably will Mrs Clinton.)

Still, the torrent of Lincoln books past and present-including over a dozen in the next few months alone-means that the bar is necessarily set high. “A. Lincoln: A Biography”, by Ronald White junior, an academic and established Lincoln historian, will be among the most substantial new entrants. Mr White sets out to chronicle Lincoln's moral and intellectual evolution. Such territory has of course been substantially covered already. For some 150 years, virtually every paper and pronouncement by the 16th president has been pored over by historians, not least by Mr White, whose analysis of Lincoln's second inaugural address in his 2002 book, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech”, is well worth perusing. Indeed, Mr White's particular passion is Lincoln's rhetoric, and the biographical bulk of the new book is mashed together, sometimes awkwardly, with line-by-line analyses of Lincoln's inaugurals and other major speeches.

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