Charles Rennie Mackintosh's finest work dates from about a dozen intensely creative years around 1900. His buildings in Glasgow, and especially his craggy masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art, are more complex and playful than any other work in Britain at that time. His interiors, many of them designed in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, are both spare and sensuous; creating a world of heightened aesthetic sensibility, especially inside the Willow Tea Rooms or The Hill House. And his inventive imagination, which played constantly with the shape of curves and squares,...

Shortlisted for International Affairs Book of the Year in the Paddy Power Political Book Awards 2014

Angela Merkel was already unique when she became German chancellor: the first female leader of Europe's biggest economy, the first from former communist East Germany and the first born after World War II. Since 2010, the debt crisis that spread from Greece to the euro region and the world economy has propelled her to center-stage, making Merkel the dominant politician in the struggle to preserve Europe's economic model and its single currency. Yet the Protestant...