Katie Stallard was a foreign correspondent for the U.K.’s Sky News in both Russia and China, from where she also reported on North and South Korea, traveling to Pyongyang and the DMZ in the course of her work. She has drawn on those experiences to write Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea, a book which looks at the ways in which authoritarian leaders in each of those countries have used history to buttress their regimes. Gideon Rachman