A good idea. By Jan Needle
Sitting down here in the wilds of Leicestershire, back on family duty, I suddenly realised that I had a blog to do. Shouldn't have been a surprise, because it usually coincides with our turn to keep the home fires burning now that one of the Aged Ps is sadly no longer with us. But it did raise the immediate question – what shall I write about? That, being a writer, is not a new question, obviously. In fact many AE blogsters ask from time to time where ideas come from, and how different people process them. As it happens my need for a subject matter coincided with some historical work I'm doing, and a couple of barely-related strands popped unbidden into my sights. One was the extraordinary suggestion/possibility that Abraham Lincoln had been shot because he was gay and refused to come out of the closet, and the other was the destruction of ancient monumental works of art or worship by the ‘new Puritans’ of ISIS. These subjects are hardly related, except that they are...