Despite their status as intellectual giants of the twentieth century, John Berger and Susan Sontag’s artistic collaboration – and intense friendship – remains virtually unknown.Published for the first time, To Tell a Story offers a glimpse into their shared history that spanned nearly a quarter-century. From sources such as their eponymous film broadcast, rare personal letters and archival recordings, the composite fragments build a portrait of a relationship that was ofte...

The Moment of Cubism is one of John Berger's most important collections of art criticism. Whether considering Vermeer in his studio, Poussin's poignant meditation on death, or the complexities of Rodin's sculpture, Berger draws together the threads that bind individual artists to their social and political context. Here Berger argues that Cubism was a moment rather than a movement, one that came and went without the consent of its key figures - Picasso and Braque above all. He mak...

First published in 1975, this finely wrought investigation remains as urgent as ever, presenting the life of those who have travelled to live and work in Europe. Art critic, novelist, and artist John Berger brings humanity and a voice to those silenced in the political debate about who does and doesn't belong.Why does the Western world look to migrant labourers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A...

In 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, L�ger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist, dividing these figures into those that struggle, those that fail, and the true masters. He explains why we should study the work of the past: in order to understand the present and to rethink the...

The 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 finding Bento's sketchbook, wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave him a beautiful virgin sketchbook, Berger sa...

Goya's Last Portrait presents the artist struggling to comprehend the relationship between his life and his work. Having painted humanity at its most violent and depraved amid the horrors of war, and also depicted the vibrancy of aristocratic life, Goya faces an overwhelming question: Has he changed the world or merely caught its reflection?The Question of Geography is set in Magadan, a town in the Soviet far east, where former political prisoners, known as 'Zeks'...

From 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 attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering.These essays ...

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.

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the town is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the fo...

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk thr...

John Berger explores the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, who, after clashing with Khrushchev, was excluded from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists. Abandoned to obscurity, Neizvestny laboured to realize a monumental and very public vision of art. Exiled to the United States, he finally found recognition, returning to his homeland with the fall of the Berlin Wall.Berger's account illuminates the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orth...

John Berger, art critic, novelist and long-time smoker, joins forces again with Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel. This charming pictorial essay reflects on the cultural implications of smoking and suggests, through a series of brilliantly inventive illustrations, that society's attitudes to smoking are paradoxical.