Some friends laugh at the absurdities - or oddities: it depends on how you look at it - that I keep on the shelves of my small library. A few months ago it underwent a severe restructuring (we have a fireplace, which makes things easier). After dusting piles of papers that I hadn't looked at for decades, I stumbled upon a gem of 20th century political literature: a hagiography of Kim Il-sung in two huge, luxurious volumes full of photographs, published by the Korean regime itself in the late 1970s. Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the current president of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is perhaps the Cold War leader who took the cult of personality furthest towards paroxysm. Stalin and Mao do not even come close to him. In addition to being the founder of the first communist monarchy in history, Comrade Kim Il-sung is today one of the few corpses in the world who occupies a position of high responsibility. I know it sounds strange, but it is literally so.