Not sure who’s writing the Economist’s Charlemagne column on Europe these days, but this observation in an article on Nicolas Sarkozy made me laugh out loud:
At the end of the Brussels summit on December 11th and 12th, Mr Sarkozy declared that the meeting would “go down in European history”. In ways he found “fantastic”, he had shaken up the EU’s habits, tripling the usual number of summits, and pushing his peers towards “less talk and much more action”. The word immodest does not do justice to Mr Sarkozy on such occasions. He does not so much brag about his achievements as offer a running commentary about the wonder of being himself. Being in charge of Europe had been “fascinating, fulfilling and rather easy,” he commented at one point.
