With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long;

That Samsung could is in large part due to a cult of personality around Mr Lee, who likes to keep things shaken up. "Change everything but your wife and children," he exhorted managers in 1993.

Public debate is also constrained by the growing personality cult that Sheikh Hasina is building around Sheikh Mujib, "the greatest Bengali of the millennium".