“... ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the free market Liberals, was committed to reducing the government deficit. That summer the preceding Grand Coalition – the name for a coalition involving Germany’s two largest ...”

“... relating to the referendum result that are very difficult to assess. Would a concession from Merkel allowing an emergency brake on the free movement of workers have been enough to tip the balance? Would either Johnson or Gove have gone it alone if the other hadn’t been there to provide cover? Did the murder of Jo Cox, counter-intuitively, harden rather ...”

“... right’ to health. Moon Jae-In, the president of South Korea, spoke of solidarity; Angela Merkel popped up to tell us wanly that the World Health Organisation was a good thing.The assembly is the annual meeting of the member states that fund and supervise the WHO. The opening session of this year’s assembly, forced online by the ...”

“... acquiring more powers, kept the EU from taking decisive action against them has been disproved. Angela Merkel, who appeared for a while to be determined to use her last term in office to make the EU more coherent, has largely lost her power. In a time of major geopolitical friction, Europe doesn’t really exist on the international stage. The EU is ...”

“... to prevent thought. Accordingly, it was possible on 11 January 2015 for François Hollande, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Benjamin Netanyahu and three dozen world leaders to assemble shoulder to shoulder at the place de la République, to march twenty abreast with arms interlinked and to chant with the crowd of a million: ‘Je suis Charlie.’A ...”

“... against a 5 per cent drop in the UK).German solidarity: During the October summit at Salzburg, Angela Merkel promised Leo Varadkar that the EU’s solidarity with Ireland on the border predicament would be ‘like nothing he’d ever feel again’. Varadkar’s reaction was mixed: ‘I thought it was very reassuring but also a bit ominous.’The Irish ...”

“... trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female ...”

“... his complaint to the world. The irony of the story, as we now know, having seen what happened to Angela Merkel’s phone, is that the NSA would have got hold of the messages between the presidents even before they hit the newspapers. Why did Snowden matter so much? Mostly because the Americans didn’t know what he still had, and how damaging it could ...”