Style
If... is a sharp and cynical satirisation of British politics and current affairs from a left wing perspective. It's named after the famous Rudyard Kipling poem. Suiting both Bell's anarchic artistic style and the paper's political stance, it consists of a short (usually three-panel) daily episode in each Monday to Thursday edition of the paper, with subjects usually covered in these 4-day-long segments. If... occasionally utilises wordplay and coarse humour - Bell is fond of using the pejorative British word "wanker" and its euphemistic variants, for example. With the Guardian's move to new presses, If... started to appear in full colour in September 2005. Initially, the title was reflected in the concept, with each week presenting a separate stand-alone story such as 'If... Dinosaurs roamed Fleet Street,' or 'If the Bash Street Kids ran the country'. This shifted into a different approach during the 1982 Falklands/Mavinas war, when Bell started to concentrate on two central characters - Royal Navy officer Kipling and the Penguin he befriends.
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)