Through the Iron Curtain

Winston Churchill's speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 was not the first mention of the concept of an 'Iron Curtain', but it was by far the most influential.

Entitled The Sinews of Peace, it recognised that Stalin had established totalitarian control over Eastern Europe, something Western statesmen were then jumping through any number of intellectual and moral hoops sooner than publicly acknowledging.

The cultural historian Patrick Wright starts with the "cherubic, pink-cheeked and very fat" ex-prime minister's speech and then ingeniously and somewhat idiosyncratically examines the political metaphor of an iron curtain from all conceivable angles. Master of the