Testing Times: the latest collection of Peter Brookes’s excellent political cartoons

As with his previous collection, Sign of the Times, this new volume of cartoons from the award-winning Times cartoonist Peter Brookes is full of great satire and brutally effective caricatures.

Testing Times is, thankfully, given the high quality production treatment that is often missing from books which contain a few photographs or cartoons in them. These are all in full colour, reproduced at a good size on high quality paper.

The one slight disappointment is the foreword from Brookes himself, which manages to cram in a remarkably large selection of pessimistic political cliches into just one page. But it’s only one page and the 108 following cartoons themselves have just the sort of originality and surprise that the foreword lacks. There’s often a touch of vulgarity about the cartoons, and a few stray into distastefulness, but they always have the redeeming feature of being about serious topics and major stories. Brookes uses the power of a cartoonist to attack the powerful and would-be powerful, not to ridicule the weak or powerless.

Whether the graphical blows of him and other satirists influence events is a often a matter for debate, but what’s sure is that this is a great collection of political cartoons – and with Christmas coming up, a good choice for presents too.

If you like this, you might also be interested in Sign of the Times by Peter Brookes.

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Buy Testing Times by Peter Brookes here.

Note: a review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher.