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The Coalition Book

By Martin Rowson

Hardback, 192 pp, £19.99

Between 2010 and 2015, Martin Rowson documented the highs and lows – mainly the lows – of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition week after week in The Guardian, as well as in The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. This book collects Rowson's best, most brutally funny cartoons from a period that began with a "big, open, comprehensive offer" to Nick Clegg, continued on through riots, phone-hacking, double-dip recession and endless debates on Europe, and will ended with the general election in 2015. Accompanied by witty explanatory text, The Coalition Book takes a biting satirical look at Cameron and Clegg's five years in charge. The book contains a foreword by Will Self.


Martin Rowson


Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work has appeared regularly in The Guardian, the Daily Mirror, the Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Spectator, the Morning Star, Tribune, New Humanist and many other publications. His first novel, Snatches, was published by Jonathan Cape, as was his memoir Stuff, which was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Other books include an anti-Dawkins, anti-Hitchens, anti-God rant, The Dog Allusion, and Fuck: The Human Odyssey, a history of the world in 67 beautiful (if foulmouthed) images. He is also a vice-president of the Zoological Society of London, the chairman of the British Cartoonists’ Association, an honorary associate of The National Secular Society and was once Ken Livingstone’s Cartoonist Laureate for London (in return for one pint of London Pride bitter per annum – now eight years in arrears). He lives in south-east London with his wife and (occasionally) their two children.

Reviews

"I'm astonished by the phantasmagorical display of political Camfoolery oozed onto every page of The Coalition Book, without restraint and with masterly execution... Rowson is a master of inky invective."
— Ralph Steadman
"An inky ninja running riot in the corridors of power."
— Phill Jupitus
"Martin Rowson's cartoons aren't just all sorts of comic genius – their exposure of the wrongdoings of those with power make you want to have a revolution, and thus pose a mortal danger to the status quo."
— Owen Jones
"Sending excoriating Exocets straight down at our current leaders, Martin Rowson is a great draughtsman and a sharply well-informed political critic with a wicked eye for detail as well as for the big picture."
— Polly Toynbee