Cartoonist Philip Zec’s extraordinary work almost caused the government to shut down the Daily Mirror, writes Joel Taylor

CARTOONISTS love courting controversy, but few have had such an impact that a piece of their work triggers the government of the day to consider shutting down the offending newspaper.
That is what happened when the Daily Mirror published Philip Zec’s famous ‘The Price of Petrol’ cartoon in March 6 1942.
The cartoon featured a sailor adrift in a choppy ocean clinging to a bit of wood, presumably what was left of the ship after it had been sunk by Nazi battleships.

An exhausted Camden still had just enough energy left for a VE Day knees-up 60 years ago on Saturday. Professor Pat Thane reveals how the task of rebuilding began

CAMDEN, like the rest of Britain, was exhausted and run-down by the last months of war. Of course, there was pleasure that it was almost over and obviously a victory. But, pock-marked by bombing, cold, dark, bleak, crumbling, unpainted, the very fabric of the city expressed the privation and tiredness of the people, aware though they were that almost everywhere else in Europe it was much, much worse.
The three main railway stations in the south of what is now Camden – then the boroughs of St Pancras, Holborn and Hampstead – made the area a target for bombing. But throughout London bombs fell randomly, their sites now marked by blocks of flats built in the late 1940s and 1950s, sometimes, as in my own Twisden Road in Dartmouth Park, interruptions of intact Victorian terraces.