Mary Darly has been called the mother of British caricature, a pioneer who – with her husband Matthias – paved the way for the ‘golden age’ of satirical prints. This chapter reveals new details of her life and her twenty-four-year career gleaned largely from study of the Darly prints and newspaper advertisements. Mary saw the importance of prints in influencing political affairs: she produced satires before her marriage in 1759 as well as after her husband’s death in 1780, and she published some of the most virulent prints in the campaign against prime minister Lord Bute in 1762–1763. Appealing to the new fashion for images that exaggerated facial features, in 1762 she published the first how-to book in English, The Principles of Caricatura Drawing. The Darlys produced a wide range of prints but their greatest success came in the 1770s with a series of caricatures of well-known people described as ‘Macaronies’. Designs were provided by enthusiastic amateurs and people flocked to the Darly shop near Charing Cross for their annual exhibitions – the first commercial print shows in London.

In the immediate post-1989 period, the symbol of the cross remained a focal point both for the power-holding conservatives and for the anticlerical post-Communists and continued to define new frontlines of conflict. After the fall of Communism, as the Catholic Church in Poland regained its hegemonic position, the cross became a visual marker of the new political order and a metonymy for the legislative changes that sanctioned the Christian worldview in Polish public life. Examining the contexts in which the symbol intersected with politics, including the abortion debate, the anti-pornography campaign, and Poland’s lustration process, I argue that, during the ideological shift that deeply transformed the country, the cross came to function as a shibboleth for the national community, which now coalesced around a new set of values and rituals, and designated new Others. While the figure of the Communist continued to haunt the cultural mainstream and inspire bizarre purification rituals such as the public crucifixion of a regime journalist, Roman Samsel, in 1990, the symbol of the cross was also subverted to mock the Catholic Church and the political elites in satire.

It is perhaps surprising how little political satire Philip Roth wrote. Over a career that spanned more than fifty years, with more than thirty books – many of them explicitly political and explicitly funny – there’s really only one book that can be truly called a political satire. That book, 1971’s Our Gang, is considered by most of its readers (if it is considered at all) an unmitigated failure. A satire of Richard Nixon, written and published in a white heat of rage before Nixon had even committed his most notorious crimes, Our Gang is a curious work in Roth’s oeuvre. This essay will look at that failure, and the handful of other times political satire appears in his work, and try to explain why Roth never fully returned to political satire as a writing strategy.