The Daily Telegraph had a story today about “the giant private train set” kept by Kim Jong-il, the paranoid and aircraft-fearing leader of North Korea.

It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, wrote for The Sunday Telegraph about a trip Kim made by armoured train to Moscow in 2001:

He brought all his own water, and he has a hundred security men to guard him. Also ten sniffer dogs. If you are Kim Jong-il, the peerless leader of North Korea and the great successor to the revolutionary cause, you probably need all the sniffer dogs you can get.

Recent correspondence with Mr Simpson prompted me to open his book News From No Man’s Land, which my wife bought a few years ago but I had not read myself.  I’m devouring it now, swept along by his enthusiasm for the trade of journalism and for what it can do and be at its best.

He writes:

It always used to irritate me to hear journalists referring to real incidents in the lives of real people as “stories”, with all the connotations which the word brings with it: dramatic incident, neatly rounded narrative, a satisfying ending. Gradually, though, I came to realize that the most important function people like me could perform was indeed to tell stories . . . Because “good” doesn’t have to mean sentimental or phoney or stupid; a good story can be something which illumines the real world, so that it stays illumined permanently.