John Berger: Once in Europa

‘I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting … A wonderful artist and thinker’

Susan Sontag

‘Berger is a writer one demands to know more about … An intriguing and powerful mind and talent’

New York Times

The Shape of a Pocket

‘The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about — Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency’ John Berger

‘An epic parable’

Independent

‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour. These essays smell of oil and resin and sweat, not only because they are about painters, but because his writing has a physical reality’

The Times

John Berger: Selected Essays

Edited by Geoff Dyer

John Berger’s diverse achievements as a writer are widely recognized. As well as plays, novels, short stories and poetry, he has always written essays, expressing more than forty years of tireless intellectual enquiry and fierce political engagement. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’) Berger’s essays are also extremely wide-ranging. Photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to are among his subjects, sometimes within the space of a single essay.

The occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in November 2001 provides the opportunity to pay tribute to the rich variety of Berger’s ideas and concerns. Viewed chronologically, this collection does not simply show how his views have changed or his thought has evolved, it can also be seen as a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as seen through the prism of art.

The central concerns that have underpinned all Berger’s writing are the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed, preoccupations that are amply demonstrated here in Geoff Dyer’s thoughtful selection from Permanent Red, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The White Bird and Keeping a Rendezvous . If you have never read John Berger before, then this book is a good place to start.

Titian: Nymph and Shepherd

This book is first a dialogue between a daughter and a father about life, physical sensation, mortality. Each seems to listen to the other with great attention. Secondly it is the extraordinary vehicle for a series of insights into the everyday life and the art of the great Venetian master, following an uncanny incident at the large exhibition of his work staged in Venice in 1990.

While attending the exhibition Katya meets an old man, who she becomes convinced can only be the ghost of the great painter. Her ‘spiritual’ visitor engages her in conversation about the minute particularities of painting some of the pictures there. She shares this experience with her father in a letter. He accepts the encounter at face value and discusses the historical background to the old man’s remarks, seeking answers to a series of evidential questions about his daughter’s encounter. From then on, the three of them, the old painter, the daughter, and the father, discuss animals, Greece, fur, sexuality, the strangeness of drawing.

bloomsbury.com/author/john-berger