One of the writer and art critic’s finest essay collections, which includes his influential essay on animal ethics, “Why Look at Animals?”; a critique of the “bourgeois sexual morality” of Rodin’s sculptures; and an unlikely work of criticism linking Francis Bacon and Walt Disney.John Berger was a thinker and writer of altogether extraordinary independence and range, an essayist, novelist, poet, and lifetime political activist whose work resonates with a voice that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Available here in one volume, writer and critic John Berger’s monumental trilogy of novels, which tenderly depicts the collapse of European peasant culture—an earthbound way of life—under the alienating forces of urbanization and capitalism.In the early 1970s, at the height of his fame, novelist and art critic John Berger moved to a small Alpine village in the Haute-Savoie. There he worked for nearly two decades on Into Their Labours, a trilogy of works th...

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 ...

Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'.A disturbing expose of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals ho...