“Keep it brief” is probably the most obvious one. In 1841 William Henry Harrison famously thundered out a 90-minute inaugural address in freezing temperatures without hat or coat and duly succumbed to pneumonia.

His performance gives him a brace of oddly complementary records in American political history — the longest inaugural speech and, at 31 days, the shortest presidency.

If the sub-zero temperatures that did for President Harrison and that have gripped Washington this week continue today, Mr Bush might consider following Ronald Reagan at his second inauguration in 1985. Conscious that, at 73, he was the oldest president ever to be sworn in, he decided climate-controlled discretion was the better part of frostbitten valour and held the only indoors formal inauguration in the past 50 years.

Mr Bush will doubtless be looking to convey some symbolism in each choreographed moment of today’s 55th inaugural.

The Bible used in the ceremony offers some intriguing possibilities. Most presidents have placed their hand on a randomly opened page; some choose more carefully. In 1969, with the country still torn over the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon chose to swear his oath over Isaiah ii, 4: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation.”

The Bible is nowhere specified in the constitutional article that provides for the inauguration, by the way, but since George Washington used a borrowed one in 1789 it has become an essential prop in the theatricals. So much so that when Lyndon Johnson was hurriedly sworn in by a Texas judge on Air Force One in Dallas in November 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, panicked aides held up the impromptu ceremony until someone could find a copy of the Good Book. Poignantly, they ended up with the only one on board — a Catholic version that belonged to the dead President, found by his bedside in his private cabin.

Mr Bush’s speech will, as the occasion demands, be a model of crafted oratory.

But surprisingly, given the solemnity and majesty of the occasion, few inaugural addresses have truly hit the highest rhetorical notes. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural was surely one; delivered as the Civil War was reaching its climacteric and now immortalised on the walls of the memorial that bears his name and image just a mile from where today’s inauguration is taking place.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to . . . bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address also took oratorical flight: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

But none before or since has matched for sheer majesty Kennedy’s address. The lyrical pen of his speechwriter Ted Sorensen turned the arid prose of political promises into timeless poetry: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Mr Bush has been criticised for going ahead with lavish celebrations at a time of war. The eleven balls at which he and First Lady Laura Bush will dance is not the highest number, but it certainly puts this week’s festivities at the more sumptuous end of the scale.

In 1945, with the Second World War still raging, FDR dispensed with balls altogether. The puritanical Jimmy Carter called his parties, rather than balls. None quite compared with Andrew Jackson’s expansiveness — he threw open the doors to the White House in 1829 and 20,000 delighted citizens gorged themselves.

One performance Mr Bush will presumably not be emulating will be John F. Kennedy’s late-night entertainment long after the formal festivities of his inauguration were over. According to one of his more reliable biographers, the young President slept with three women other than his wife that night.

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