Iron Curtain

The phrase 'Iron Curtain' was coined by Winston Churchill in a speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946. But was it? This elegant, original and wide-ranging history traces the origins of the metaphor in a device to contain theatre fires, through its use to describe the blockade of the fledgling Soviet Union after the First World War, to its transformation into a brutal reality after the Second, and asks whether the curtain really came down with the Berlin Wall.