It would be too easy to decide the print cartoon is dominated by North Americans. Aside from the ongoing aura which surrounds the New Yorker cartoonists - as well as the enduring genius of James Thurber and the late, great Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts, or the surreal vision of Gary Larson's The Far Side - Searle's very English, quasi-Hogarthian satirical drawings from the 1950s remain sharp, vicious, so very clever and very, very funny. Aside from inciting pangs of regret for not having attended a school quite like St Trinian's - where the sinister new science teacher arrives on her broomstick, most of the girls look like assassins and an unpopular member of staff is left hanging by the neck from a tree - this selection should leave most readers anxious to peruse all of Searle's work.
Among the gems gathered here is `The Rake's Progress' sequence in which all the protagonists end badly. While among the classics from the `Souls in Torment' series a weary looking Penguin bird, bags under his eyes, asks his exhausted pal the immortal question, "Read any good books lately?"
Strange Beauty, Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century
