John Berger, reissues from Verso

Bento’s Sketchbook

A deeply moving exploration of the relationship between thinking and drawing, from the author of the groundbreaking Ways of Seeing

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 said, ‘This is Bento’s!’ and he began to draw, taking inspiration from the philosopher’s vision.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Berger uses the imaginative space opened up in this experiment to explore politics, storytelling, Spinoza’s life and times, and the process of drawing itself.

Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

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.

Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing

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 political

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, Léger 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 future.

First published in 1960, Permanent Red established John Berger as a firebrand critic willing to broadcast controversial opinions on some of the most important British artists of the day, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.