The Political World in Print — Images and Imagination

This chapter looks at a selection of printed, non-news mediations of British politics collected during our research period.1 We give particular emphasis to a category that we have called ‘colour writing’, of which parliamentary sketches are a core example, and to that long-standing vehicle of critical political expression — the editorial cartoon. We also give briefer attention to other forms, including newspaper ‘leaders’, a genre of writing in which it is opinion rather than information as such which is given priority and where the newspaper’s own identity, as well as its views, are given strong visibility. We conclude with some examples of parody from the satirical magazine Private Eye, examples which take a more elaborate and sustained approach to comic design than most of the other work we examine.