Aidan Foster-Carter, even after 45 years studying Korea, says he started out as a “somewhat amateur” Koreanist in “a way that would only be possible for someone of my generation… This was something I fell into rather than planned, so I regret missing out on proper language training and so on. That apart, no regrets at all!”

Having originally seen the South as the enemy, a visit in 1982 completely changed his mind. “The facts hadn’t changed, but I hadn’t been looking.”

At the time he had been pro-North Korean and had written on the DPRK economy and “how wonderful