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Here's the Houston Telegraph on our great life today.

The leanest, lanchest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame,

he has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly. Here's the New York Herald. The small intellect growing

smaller, a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar and who delivers

hackneyed illiterate compositions.

And here's my own paper, The Times, on our great life's most famous speech.

Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn't be easy to reproduce.

Abraham Lincoln is this week's choice, and he's championed by Eliza Manningham Buller, a former

director general of our security Service, MI5.

It's a big life, Lady Manningham Buller, no doubt, but why him for you?

Well, first those journalists may have got his appearance right but nothing else I think.

I first became interested in Lincoln when I was posted to the British Embassy in Washington in

1990. My job was to try and improve the exchange

of intelligence largely with the FBI, also the CIA, and I knew nobody in Washington. I had one telephone number of a friend of my sisters

to contact. It was to begin with and so I thought you know when you're lonely

take up an interest so I thought I would learn a bit about the Civil War, which of course happened all round

Washington, lots of battlefields within easy range. And as I read into the subject a bit, I found Lincoln really

the most interesting figure of that whole complex bit of American history. You introduced him for his ugliness.

He certainly was the first to say what he looked like and be rude about his own appearance but that's in a way one of the

things I like about him he's very different to many a current politician he's without

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