Samuel Johnson prize-winning author Frank Dikötter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. Are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders? The cult of personality in the twentieth century.