7 results for "History"

G.

Berger, John
"In this Booker Prize-winning classic, a Casanova-esque young man searches for philosophical and sexual fulfillment as he seduces his way across Europe on the eve of World War I. John Berger's picaresque work, one of the author's best novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the 20th century. 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 those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history"-- Provided by publisher.
New York Review Books 2026-06-16 366 pages

Portraits: John Berger on artists

Berger, John
John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of art revealing his fascination with the artist. In Portraits, Berger connects the artist and history in revolutionary ways, from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to Cy Twombly's radical work. In his penetrating and singular prose, 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. A beautifully illustrated walk through many centuries of visual culture from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices."
Verso 2017-11-21 512 pages

Landscapes: John Berger on art

Berger, John
"With Portraits, world-renowned art writer John Berger took us on a captivating journey through centuries of art, situating each artist in the proper political and historical contexts. In Landscapes, a narrative of Berger's own journey emerges. Through his penetrating engagement with the writers and artists who shaped his own thought, Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxembourg and Bertolt Brecht among them, Landscapes allows us to understand how Berger came to his own way of seeing. As always, Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his painter's eyes lead him to refer to himself only as a storyteller. A landscape is, to John Berger, like a portrait, an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid definition. It's a term, too, that reminds us that there is more here than simply the backdrop or 'by-work' of a portrait. Landscapes offers a tour of the history of art, but not as you know it"--
Verso 2016 254 pages

Hold everything dear: dispatches on survival and resistance

Berger, John
A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice 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 offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.
Verso 2025-03-25 160 pages

The selected essays of John Berger

Berger, John
Booker-winning novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic, John Berger has excelled in a variety of literary fields. This collection of essays takes a definitive look at his career. Berger's essays were ground breaking, polemic, reflective, and radically original. Spanning more than 40 years of intellectual enquiry and political engagement, these essays are viewed chronologically to provide a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of time refracted through the prism of art.
Bloomsbury 2001 588 pages

The moment of Cubism: and other essays

Berger, John
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 makes a case for Cubism’s revolutionary influence. As always, Berger helps us see the world in new ways
Verso 2026-04-14 139 pages

Collected poems

Berger, John
Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic - John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time. For sixty years he has been challenging the way we see the world and how we think about it, in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag and G. But although Berger has always written poetry, often smuggling poems inside books like The Seventh Man and The White Bird, this is the first time his poetry has been collected in English. Collected Poems reflects Berger's longstanding concerns with art and politics, love and war, history and memory, emigration, immigration and the life of the European peasantry. It includes well-known poems like 'The Ladle', 'Village Maternity' and 'Death of La Nan M.' as well over twenty previously unpublished poems. From 'My Coney' (written in 1952 when Berger was just twenty-six) to 'They Are the Last' written in 2008, Berger the poet demonstrates an enduring commitment to the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. These are perfectly framed still-life images, sensual and plain, delicate sketches of hard lives caught between the provisional quality of language and the permanence of things. John Berger's Collected Poems reveals its author to be a major poet of our time.
Smokestack Books 2014 146 pages