President George W. Bush is well known for his verbal awkardness. Sometimes it is hard not to be disheartened by his speeches – for example, when he told a New Hampshire audience: “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your families.”

In fact, though, many of the president’s speeches – in particular his foreign policy speeches after 9/11 – are beautifully written and more than competently delivered. Starting with his ad-libbed bullhorn cry atop a wrecked fire truck at Ground Zero (“I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”) and his address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the attack, he has generally struck a fine note. If anything, Mr Bush’s foreign policy speechifying suffers from the opposite problem: he is too verbal.