How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fac...

A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justiceFrom the ‘War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned att...

A brilliant collection of Berger's early works including the essential essay on the relationship of drawing and the artist.This anthology of some of John Berger’s most incisive and brilliant essays and articles, written throughout the 1960s, is one of his most celebrated books. The pieces span from the life of artists like Camille Corot and Fernand Léger; character sketches of the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin, Jack Yeats, and Che Guevara; and reflections ...

Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Any artwork reflects the artist’s intentions, but also its times: therefore all art is politicalIn Permanent Red, John Berger argues that the contemporary artist should strive for a realism that aims for hope, to transform the world. Surveying the work of historical artists as well as that of near contemporaries such as Picasso, Léger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist...

Weaving art criticism with poetry, memoir with political commentary, this collection of essays is a prompt to reimagine the worldIn The Sense of Sight, John Berger considers the peculiar and complex practice of attentive observation. Ranging through subjects as distant from each other as the Renaissance from Hiroshima, encountering artists such as Goya, Dürer, and Van Gogh, Berger explores the deeply political nature of our engagement with the visual world...

“A rich and lovely exploration of art history” from the world-renowned art critic behind Ways of Seeing (Slate)!A diverse cast of artists comes to life in this jargon-free study Zadie Smith hails as “among the greatest books on art I’ve ever read.”One of the world’s most celebrated art writers takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. Berger groun...

John Berger’s intimate meditations on what is past, passing, and to comeBeginning each essay with an image, Keeping a Rendezvous examines the nature of the artistic encounter. Berger delves into questions of political struggle, the utility of hope, our relationship to images, and the role of art in our lives. By communing with the artists, revolutionaries and thinkers of the past, he shows how looking at art places us in a dialogue with history.In vivid, te...

The Booker Prize winner’s poignant debut novel, a meditation on the interplay between art, exile and politicsExiled with his wife in 1950s London, Hungarian artist Janos Lavin struggles to find financial stability and artistic freedom in his new home. A friend, John, organises an exhibition of Lavin’s work, only for the artist to disappear shortly after. John tries to figure out what happened, piecing together clues from diaries, letters and artworks that slowly un...

A deeply moving exploration of the relationship between thinking and drawing, from the author of the groundbreaking Ways of SeeingThe seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.For years, without knowing what its pages might hold, John Berger has imagined fin...

A collection of interwoven stories, this is a portrait of two worlds - a small Alpine village bound to the earth and by tradition, and the restless, future-driven culture that will invade it - at their moment of collision. The instrument of entrapment is love. Lives are lost and hearts broken.

John Berger writes: '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 certain hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, ou...

A new edition of John Berger and Jean Mohr's classic investigation into the nature of photography and what makes it so different from other art forms'One of the world's most influential art critics … Berger sees clearly with fresh surprise yet profound understanding' Washington TimesIn one of the most eloquent accounts of photography ever devised, the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr set out to understand the funda...