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counterparts used the April 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull to
comment on the British General Election campaign, then under-
way. In Eruption Smothers Britain , Christian Adams shows the
country smothered by ash-cloud portraits of the three party lead-
ers, Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Gerald
Scarfe, in One Still Flying , depicts Cameron and Brown trying
to shoot down with bows and arrows a buoyant Nick Clegg, the
Liberal Democrat leader. In the background a volcano, 'Public
Unrest', is spewing forth a cloud of black smoke.
Rudolphe Raspe wrote in his comic The Surprising Travels
and Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1785) how he was inspired
by Patrick Brydone's account of his Tour Through Sicily to Malta
(1780) to induce the eponymous baron to visit Mount Etna.
Moving from the rational tone of Brydone to the manic voice
of Munchausen, Raspe leaps, like Empedocles, into the crater of
Etna. There he meets Vulcan and his Cyclopes, who entertained
him liberally and healed the wounds and the burns he sustained
in his fall. Vulcan explained how he threw red-hot coals at his
assistants when he got angry, and they would parry them and
throw them up out of the crater causing 'what I find you mortals
Image not available - no digital rights
Frederick G. Byron,
The Volcano of Opposition ,
1791, hand-coloured
engraving. Edmund
Burke is in Parliament's
House of Commons in
London denouncing the
French Revolutionary
Constitution.
 
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