John Berger
John Peter Berger (1926 – 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet.
“The way he characterises himself instead is as a storyteller. When he was writing his series of novels about peasants in the French Alps, he looked back at the rest of his works and said, “even when I was writing about art, it was really a way of story-telling.” Tom Overton, Berger’s biographer, on the best books on Berger.
Berger won the 1972 Booker Prize.
Books by John Berger
“Berger says that drawing is as old as song. I do believe there is something primal about it.” Read more...
The best books on Drawing as Thought
Andrea Kantrowitz, Artists & Art Critic
“This is where animal studies and art interpretation meet. Although I don’t agree 100% with his account of the evolution of our relationship with animals, it’s a fascinating account that I think is worth looking at. And it’s powerfully written.” Read more...
The best books on Animal Consciousness
David Peña-Guzmán, Philosopher
“When Berger published his art history in the 1970s, traditional attitudes were starting to break down around the representation of the nude body.” Read more...
The best books on Understanding the Nude
Annebella Pollen, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“Of his novels, it’s probably my favourite…To explain it, it’s an Aids novel. It’s from 1994. I get the impression that it grows out of his engagement with Susan Sontag. They had been in correspondence a lot and shaped each others’ writing on photography. She published AIDS and Its Metaphors in 1989. At that time it was a particularly pressing subject. Berger began writing it, and as he was writing a member of his family was diagnosed as HIV-positive and he ended up caring for them, so he gained a different perspective.” Read more...
Tom Overton, Biographer
“It follows interconnected peasant families through several generations and traces what’s happening to them.” Read more...
Tom Overton, Biographer
“Berger used half of the money from the Booker prize to travel around Europe with Jean Mohr, the photographer, and document the lives of migrant workers in Europe, who were and are being exploited to ensure the European standard of life. Going back to your earlier question about whether his politics make him more difficult to read, here they’re precisely one of the reasons one would want to read him now. At the launch of Portraits Andrew Marr put up his hand and started talking about how important A Seventh Man was to him as a book. It feels like a response to things that are happening now…The book is largely about Turkish Gastarbeiter in Germany. A lot of these people came from villages in Turkey.” Read more...
Tom Overton, Biographer
“So the landscape is almost virgin and primordial, but at the same time, you get this very forward-thinking, almost revolutionary, doctor John Sassall. He’s kind of as much an alchemist as he is a doctor. It’s almost a nature documentary, this little microcosm of the country doctor as viewed through the lens of John Berger.” Read more...
The Best Books of Landscape Writing
Dan Richards, Travel Writer
The Success and Failure of Picasso
by John Berger
“Picasso’s such a varied and impossible to pin down character. What can be produced in the process of trying to get there is the interesting thing.”
Interviews where books by John Berger were recommended
The best books on John Berger, recommended by Tom Overton
The biographer and editor of John Berger reveals how Berger’s self-characterisation as a storyteller is visible across the numerous genres he writes in.
The Best Books of Landscape Writing, recommended by Dan Richards
Good writing offers readers an invitation to explore and engage with the world around them, says Dan Richards—author of Outpost and Climbing Days—as he recommends five brilliant books that exemplify the skill of landscape writing.
The best books on Medicine and Literature, recommended by Gavin Francis
What can literature offer to medicine and what can medicine offer to literature? Author and physician Gavin Francis offers his professional opinion – and prescribes a list of five notable books at the intersection of his two great passions.
The best books on Understanding the Nude, recommended by Annebella Pollen
Nudity is not the same as the nude. Nor is nudity the same as nudism, but they tend to overlap quite a lot in people’s minds. Annebella Pollen, an authority on the many varied forms of British nudism in the twentieth century shares key influences on her own research to help us unpack (or undress?) the idea of nudity in western culture, showing the many ways in which nakedness can be a form of dress.
The Best Art History Books for Teenagers, recommended by John Harrison
Which are the best books to get a teenager excited about art history? We turned to veteran art history teacher John Harrison, formerly head of the art history department at Eton College, for his top five picks of the most illuminating and accessible books for getting a broad overview of the history of art.
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1
The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design
by Marty Neumeier -
2
Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle
by Martin Kornberger -
3
Ways of Seeing
by John Berger -
4
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari -
5
Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft - 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry
by Deborah Cadbury
The best books on Branding, recommended by Robert Jones
The best books on Branding, recommended by Robert Jones
To brand is human, says practitioner and professor Robert Jones. He recommends the five best books on branding.
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1
The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition
by Kristin Andrews -
2
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
by Vinciane Despret, translated by Brett Buchanan -
3
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
by Ed Yong -
4
The Emotional Lives of Animals
by Marc Bekoff -
5
Why Look At Animals?
by John Berger
The best books on Animal Consciousness, recommended by David Peña-Guzmán
The best books on Animal Consciousness, recommended by David Peña-Guzmán
The more we learn about the minds of other species, the more we are forced to question any assumptions that might previously have been made about their inner lives. Here, the philosopher David Peña-Guzmán talks us through the profound questions thrown up by research into animal cognition, perception and emotion, as he recommends five of the best books on animal consciousness.
The best books on Drawing as Thought, recommended by Andrea Kantrowitz
Doodling is no mere pastime; drawing is a form of thinking. In fact, visuospatial reasoning underlies all thinking, as this selection of books about drawing from painter and scholar Andrea Kantrowitz shows us. Just pick up a pencil and draw!
The best books on John Berger recommended by Tom Overton