Unfortunately, the EU s unfolding tragedy characteristically feeds on such glimmers of hope. Germany remains willing to do the minimum and nothing more to hold the euro together, and the EU s recent steps have merely reinforced German resistance to further concessions.

The increasing role of other powers in the region Iran and Turkey, but China above all gives local leaders even more wriggle room, particularly because, as Lukashenka said in characteristically unguarded fashion during a visit to Beijing, China s investment has never had any political strings attached.

The Bank of Japan and the ECB were, characteristically, the slowest to react, keeping their policy rates higher for longer, and not undertaking QE and other extraordinary liquidity measures until late in the day. Indeed, it required new leaders in both institutions Haruhiko Kuroda at the BOJ and Mario Draghi at the ECB finally to set monetary policy right.

(Europe has more single mothers than the US, but, characteristically, has less need to moralize about them one way or the other). In US pop culture, the single mother has evolved from selfish yuppie or drug dazed slut into a woman who is more fun, slightly more heroic, and certainly less frumpy than her married counterpart.

The centerpiece of Obama s visit was his address in Jerusalem, in which employing his characteristically compelling rhetoric he won over the skeptical Israeli public by appealing to their sense of morality, asking them to imagine the conflict from a Palestinian perspective. And yet, while the speech was widely considered a successful exercise in public diplomacy, it did not herald renewed US involvement in peace negotiations.

That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question I didn't know how I was going to get out of it I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah, she said, Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright.

In Italy, the bourgeoisie of Milan and Rome have made a point of spending winter days dressed in characteristically German Loden overcoats. When Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently appealed for a Latin empire to assert itself against Germany, his call was widely rejected, with several of his contemporaries asserting that, on the contrary, Germany should serve as a model for Italy as it seeks to overcome its current malaise.