Last night, nearly three years to the day since she handed over the reins of power to Olaf Scholz, Angela Merkel appeared at London’s Royal Festival Hall to promote her newly published memoir, Freiheit, or ‘Freedom’.

The compulsion to write her memoirs first arose in 2015, she said, out of a desire to explain her decision to open Germany’s doors to over one million asylum seekers

Merkel’s autobiography comes at an important moment for the country she used to govern.