… in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

Wonder if it needs to be updated to deal with the Putin/Medvedev threat? The first task, though, is to figure out how to pronounce ‘Medvedev’. There was an hilarious discussion on the Today programme yesterday involving John Sargent and the BBC’s pronounciation expert who said that the correct pronounciation involved putting a ‘y’ after each consonant (or something like that). Sargent took an endearingly practical approach to incomprehensible names, recalling that whenever he reported on the doings of the Revd. Ndabaningi Sithole he never attempted the forename without first thinking “rubber dinghy”.