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“... Sartre and Beauvoir, Jean Genet and others – though none under B for Beckett, and none for John Berger, who was cool at first, then much warmer, coming under fire from David Sylvester – another S – for disparaging Giacometti’s work in the 1950s, and then for revising his opinion after the artist’s death in 1966. ‘Head of a ...”

“... world. ‘The dream of purity and freshness was born from the omnipresence of muck and dust,’ John Berger wrote in his essay ‘A Load of Shit’. ‘This polarity must be one of the deepest rooted in human imagination, intimately connected with the idea of home as a shelter – against many things, including dirt.’ For Walt Whitman, ‘this ...”

“... indulge in orgies of this: ‘We consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges.’ This impatience with literary artefacts means that he ...”

“... reproduction of Balthasar Denner’s 1721 painting Alte Frau to a touching remembrance of the late John Berger to a dual meditation on ageing – ‘the great unsexing’, as she calls it, ‘the disappearance of gender, over time’ – and the unencumbered way her father thought about art. All this makes her ask of herself: ‘Who am I to speak of this ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...”

“... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some ...”

“... must have had a good deal to do with it. The phrase ‘ways of seeing’ crops up, reminding us of John Berger and his allegedly penetrating double squint. The authorial assumption which remains unquestioned at the end of the book – after 350 pages in which the word ‘spatial’ appears rarely fewer than three times per paragraph and sometimes twice in ...”

“... in Oberkampf in the 1990s, and in his photography book and in his jazz book, and in the one about John Berger he did in 1986, as he was starting out. He writes, often, about romance and glamour and pleasure and excitement. Even more, he writes about listlessness and ambivalence and prevarication, the digressions and distractions that seem to stop him ...”

“... post-industrial societies, private ownership has started to lose its central regulating role. John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an Internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: ‘And if the stock market profited everybody?’ The strategy is ...”

“... Edward Said’s essay about the Palestinians with photographs by Jean Mohr, who worked with John Berger, is a wonderful book. Text and images illustrate one another. The book is calculated to nourish and enlarge our sympathy and our imagination in just the way that social understanding requires. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, a Palestinian ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of ...”

“... that the latter are art historians at all. He calls them ‘the fallen’, a category in which John Berger becomes Gombrich’s unlikely bedfellow: for the provocative reductionism of Berger’s Ways of Seeing, equating painting with property, shares with Art and Illusion an appeal to a firm wall of material fact.If ...”

“... sources. A.J. Ayer, preacher of logical positivism, was small, sensual and irrepressibly witty. John Chinnery, a ‘China expert’, was very young and still in the Communist Party, although his Party discipline was constantly threatened by his merry sense of the absurd (he was to become an inspirational professor of Chinese at Edinburgh). Last, and most ...”

“... interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than ...”

“... than Picasso the Charlatan. But the curious fact is that when Michael Ayrton in the Fifties or John Berger in the Sixties tried to react to the generally unctuous tone of what passed for Picasso criticism, they produced essays which rebounded more on themselves than on Picasso, though these are among the finest writers on art of the past ...”