Sink or Swim: Catholicism in Sixties Britain through John Ryan’s Cartoons
ALANA HARRIS & ISABEL RYAN
(SACRISTY PRESS, 140 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The Sixties were extraordinary by any stretch of the imagination. Whether we think of the independence movements ending the British Empire, the women’s movement, Vietnam, the student uprisings in Paris, the Prague Spring or the Summer of Love with its accompanying sex, drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll, it all adds up to a relentless tide of social and political transformations unprecedented before mass media became the norm. Throw into this mix the Second Vatican Council, the burgeoning of “permissive” social mores and the legislation supporting it, as well as the beginning of the Troubles, and there was more than enough to keep a shrewdly observant Catholic cartoonist in business.