John Berger was born a hundred years ago today. He was an artist, critic, novelist, poet, polemicist and playwright who made impassioned, idiosyncratic, fiercely attentive and deeply humane contributions to a swathe of artistic and intellectual disciplines across six decades. In fact, the diversity of his output can make it “difficult to grasp,” as Geoff Dyer observes, in his introduction to the Selected Essays. “Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations.”
I hope the recommendations below provide a somewhat representative handle on Berger’s range. I have limited myself to books he assembled himself, which means I haven’t allowed myself to include anthologies, such as the excellent Understanding a Photograph, edited by Dyer, or Tom Overton’s collections Landscapes and Portraits, or the recent selection Across a Frontier, chosen by the similarly interdisciplinary critic, photographer and novelist Teju Cole.
