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...

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...

The writing career of Booker Prize winner John Berger–poet, storyteller, playwright, and essayist–has yielded some of the most original and compelling examinations of art and life of the past half century. In this essential volume, Geoff Dyer has brought together a rich selection of many of Berger’s seminal essays.Berger’s insights make it impossible to look at a painting, watch a film, or even visit a zoo in quite the same way again. The vast range of subjects he addresses, the le...

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Jo Hamya.'Fascinating . . . an extraordinary mixture of historical detail and sexual meditation . . . G. belongs in the tradition of George Eliot, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer.' New York TimesIn this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early ye...

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...

When the Japanese Empire went to war with the Allies in December 1941, it had already been fighting in China for 10 years. During that time it had conquered huge areas of China, and subjugated millions of people. The Japanese needed to control the Chinese population in these occupied territories, and for this reason they set up governments from amongst the leaders of the Chinese who were willing to co-operate with them. These so-called ‘puppet’ governments were designed to rule on behalf o...

The cast-offs of modern urban society are driven out onto the edges of the city and left to make a life there for themselves. They are not, however, in any natural wilderness, but in a world of refuse and useless junk - a place which denies any form of sustainable life. Here, the unemployed, the homeless, the old and the bereft struggle to build shelters out of old tin cans, scavenge for food and fight against insuperable odds. And yet somehow they survive: it seems that society thrives on...

The first of a three-volume series examining the history of Chinese "puppet" soldiers fighting for the Japanese before and during World War II.When the Japanese Empire went to war with the Allies in December 1941. it had already been fighting in China for 10 years. During that time, it had conquered huge areas of China, and subjugated millions of people. The Japanese needed to control the Chinese population in these occupied territories, and for this reason they set...

In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, John Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of thos...

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Simon McBurney.'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'.When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into...

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...

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...