A journey along the Iron Curtain

In 1946, Churchill declared that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent”. But what exactly did this rhetorical border look like during the Cold War, and what’s happening along it today? Timothy Phillips tells David Musgrove about his experiences travelling the length of the border between east and west, exploring the borderlands where a clash of ideologies was at its most intense.

Timothy Phillips is the author of The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey Along Europe's Cold War Border (Granta Books, 2022)