North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin.

North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.

North Korea is probably the only country in the world deliberately kept out of the Internet.

In the 1990s, the United States offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons programme.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, people thought I wasn't funny anymore.