Selected Essays of John Berger

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John Berger’s achievements as a writer are both widely recognised and — because of their diversity — difficult to grasp. Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations. The questions ‘Which is his best book?’ or ‘Which book should I read first?’ are unanswerable. It is the entire body of work that is remarkable; no single volume represents Berger adequately. However, the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, in November 2001, provided a timely opportunity to try to come up with just such a book.

Throughout his working life Berger has written essays. Far from being adjuncts to the main body of work, these essays are absolutely central to it. Many of the ideas in the ground-breaking book and TV series Ways of Seeing — ideas which have since become part of our received cultural knowledge — were presented first and, in some ways, more sensitively, in essays for New Society. 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, of course, extremely wide-ranging. It is not just that he has written on photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, on zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to; these diverse concerns are often combined in the course of a single essay. Taken together, however, this signature variegation emphasises the continuities that have underpinned more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. Viewed chronologically they do not simply show how his views have changed or how his thought has evolved; they add up to a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as refracted through the prism of art.

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