Why are quotes so often misattributed? 

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed with my husband, as in moments of weakness I do. But what is the source of the quotation?

The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it: a few big names – Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde – attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings.

So, talking of iron, Churchill’s phrase the iron curtain had been used before him. It secured attention, though, when he used it in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’

Someone found that the phrase had been used by Vasily Rozanov in 1918 in his book The Apocalypse of Our Times: ‘An iron curtain is being lowered, creaking and squeaking, at the end of Russian history.’ I can’t say I knew anything about Rozanov and I have no intention of reading that book.

His metaphor came from the theatre. In 1794, the Morning Post had reported that the new Drury Lane Theatre had ‘an iron curtain, which extends to the walls, and is so calculated as completely to prevent the flames spreading to the front of the House, though the scenes were to catch fire’. The theatre burnt down on 24 February 1809.

It was then that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the owner of the theatre, as he sat in the Piazza Coffee House near the burning building, was reputed to have responded to remarks about his philosophical calmness: ‘A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.