  Certain cocycles constructed by Connes are characters of $p$-summable
Fredholm modules. In this article, we establish some consequences of the
universal properties which these characters enjoy. Our main technical result is
that the entire cyclic cohomology of the p-th Schatten ideal L^p (respectively,
homology) is independent of p and isomorphic to the entire cyclic cohomology
(respectively, homology) of the ideal of trace class operators L^1.
