AS A schoolgirl, Angela Merkel spent an entire swimming lesson perched on a diving board. Only when the final bell sounded did she find the nerve to take the plunge. “I am not spontaneously courageous,” the German chancellor later said. “I am, I think, courageous at the right moment,” but “led too much by my head” to leap recklessly in. For Margaret Heckel, author of a book about Mrs Merkel, the story shows that “she goes to her limits and then overcomes them.” She has a “very fundamental confidence in her abilities.”
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