Berger was born in London in 1926 and was raised in moderate comfort by his lower-middle-class Jewish parents. At the age of eleven, he managed to secure a scholarship to St Edward’s, a prestigious boarding school in north Oxford. Berger did not enjoy the institution’s stuffy atmosphere and made a habit of arguing with his classmates and teachers, taking radical stances to provoke their most reactionary tendencies. When he turned sixteen, he finally absconded, returning to London to study art, first at the Central School of Art and Design and then at the Chelsea College of Arts.

After college, Berger spent a year struggling to make ends meet as a professional artist before finding his feet at the BBC World Service, providing descriptions of great artworks for those listening at the peripheries of the crumbling British Empire. Through this work, he eventually managed to catch the attention of T. C. Worsley, the literary editor of the New Statesman. Thus began a decade working at the magazine as a controversial but highly respected art critic. Berger’s writing from this period is concise and accessible but remains full of characteristic insight — employing an explicitly Marxist lens tempered by the influences of other European thinkers such as Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Walter Benjamin.

What seems to have fascinated Berger most was how economic forces shape the kinds of meaning art is allowed to produce in any given society. He was, for instance, immediately skeptical of the Abstract Expressionists and issued a particularly scathing evaluation of Jackson Pollock. According to Berger, the American painter remained unable to “see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs” and, as a result, his work remained useless, evidence only of “wasted” talent. This was one of the moments in Berger’s criticism where his resistance to the developments of postwar abstraction risked undermining his self-professed radicalism. Yet this resistance to what was universally celebrated, a kind of inverted conservatism, was part of Berger’s charm — always toeing the line between progressive idealism and respect for tradition.

It was not until 1972 that Berger would reach the height of his fame. This was the year that Ways of Seeing was first aired, garnering Berger a legion of young devotees. It was also the year that he would win the prestigious Booker Prize for G., a picaresque novel following an Italian lothario whose sexual exploits were no doubt based on some of Berger’s own infidelities. When G. was awarded the Booker, Berger caused controversy by delivering an acceptance speech in which he dismissed the tradition of literary prizes and pledged half his winnings to the British Black Panther Party, which had two years prior helped lead a campaign in solidarity with the Mangrove Nine, a group of activists falsely accused of inciting a riot in 1970. As the story goes, Berger left the ceremony to go to a pub in north London, where he handed over the money and toasted the Panthers’ success.

Following the widely reported Booker controversy, Berger began to spend less time in England. He had already relocated to Geneva with his second wife in 1962. And by 1974, he had moved again, this time to the tiny alpine village of Quincy. Berger’s new home was intentionally remote, and yet this isolation did not dilute his engagement with world events. In 1975, he collaborated with the photographer Jean Mohr on The Seventh Man, a stunning narrativization of the plight of Europe’s migrant workers. Almost two decades later he published the essay collection Keeping a Rendezvous, which includes a romantic defense of Britain’s striking miners. Reflecting on the wreckage of Thatcherism, he wrote, “They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home.”

One of the most frequently neglected aspects of Berger’s thought was his commitment to the cause of Palestinian liberation. “I’m not ashamed of being a Jew,” he wrote to the author Philip O’Connor in 1967, “but I’m profoundly ashamed of Israel.” In 2003, after half a century of anticipation, Berger finally made his first journey to Palestine, a transformative experience that he recalls in the essay “A Moment in Ramallah.” Berger opens by describing the photographs that lined the walls of the city, memorializing those killed in the second intifada with the same care and attention usually reserved for his reflections on the portraits of Pablo Picasso or Rembrandt. One by one, he observes each face, straining to decode the stories they might tell.

Deftly, Berger then moves from a kind of art criticism to a discussion of the asymmetries of power that these images are evidence of. Here are men and women who were born in refugee camps, who had to work rather than go to school, and whose aspirations have since been crushed under the wheels of the occupation.

Any comparison between the weapons involved in these confrontations returns us to what poverty is about. On one hand, Apache and Cobra helicopters, F-16s, tanks, Humvee jeeps, electronic surveillance systems, tear gas; on the other hand, catapults, slingshots, mobile telephones, badly used Kalashnikovs and, mostly, handmade explosives. The enormity of the contrast reveals something which I can feel between these grief-stricken walls but which I cannot put a name to.

For once, the critic is lost for words. There are simply no other “ways of seeing” the violence of genocide.

By the time he donated his archive to the British Library in 2009, Berger’s mental and physical health had greatly deteriorated. His vision was clouding as he awaited a surgery to remove two cataracts from his eyes. It was during this same period that Berger met Tom Overton, then a young researcher who had been tasked with sorting through the writer’s archive. Thus began a yearslong dialogue between the two men, at first professional but later resembling something more like friendship. Their conversations would eventually lay the ground for Overton’s biography.

One gets a sense of Overton working in dialogue with his subject throughout From Life, which frequently moves between different modes of address, alternating between “him” and “you” to describe its subject. Overton’s Berger is not a series of neatly arranged facts but someone intimately involved in the construction of his own biography. As if to prove this point, Overton often questions and doubts his subject, allowing his tone to shift between love, frustration, admiration, and disappointment. “Will you slip into the past when I’ve properly told your story?” he asks Berger toward the end of the book; “Will you leave me alone?” he asks at another point; “Do I want you to?” he asks himself. These are unanswerable questions.

Of course, as part of this eerie communion, Overton also allows himself to question some of Berger’s choices. The writer’s chaotic personal life — four marriages, three children, and a string of lovers discarded with seemingly casual disdain — comes under particular scrutiny. Berger’s divorce from his second wife, the aristocrat Rosemary Guest, seems to have been particularly complicated. In his brief discussion of it, Overton is at pains to insert Rosemary’s voice, citing a diary entry in which she describes her divorce papers as a “death warrant,” the signing of which preceded six “nightmare, near-suicidal weeks in Sicily.” Such claims might seem a tad dramatic, but Overton also notes the same tone of panic in the writings of Berger’s other wives — Anya Bostock and Beverly Bancroft — both of whom were summarily abandoned by the writer.

These details not only demonstrate the breadth of Overton’s research — combing through multiple archives and speaking to all those who knew Berger — but cast an unfavorable light on the ways in which Berger lived his own politics. It was the esteemed film critic Laura Mulvey who once credited Berger for inspiring her pioneering work on the male gaze. But whatever use Berger’s work might have for feminist critics, his interventions are haunted by the lives of those women who were cast aside in the wake of his desires. In From Life, Overton offers Berger some credit for recognizing his inability to sacrifice immediate pleasure to long-term stability. He is also sympathetic to his subject’s yearning for a less stubbornly monogamous culture. But he does not hesitate to cast aspersions on the critic’s repetitive infidelities and the havoc that they wrought on lives of his partners. “What are you thinking?” he asks at one point, seemingly at a loss for words.

When John Berger passed away on January 2, 2017, he was ninety years old and terrified of the world he was leaving behind. Just before the millennium, he had been asked to choose a painting to describe the feeling of the present moment. After some thought, Berger chose the depictions of hell featured in Hieronymus Bosch’s so-called Millennium Triptych. As he claimed, these grotesque images provide “a strange prophecy of the mental climate imposed on the world at the end of our century by globalization and the new economic order. . . .  there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamor of the disparate, fragmentary present.”

The world has only grown more “disparate and fragmentary” since then. Had he lived to one hundred, there can be no doubt that Berger would have been horrified by the growth of AI, the steady rise of the far right, and perhaps most of all by the silence of Western power regarding a genocide played out before the eyes of the world. But as heroic as Berger was, he was a product of an intellectual and political climate less hostile to dissent than our own.

In 1972, it was the BBC that made the bold decision to broadcast an art show, written and presented by a self-professed Marxist who hoped to rewrite the history of Western art. In 2026, after decades of attacks from government, the same BBC faces escalating threats of privatization and has been forced to crack down on its programming to ensure it remains politically neutral — a euphemism for accommodating right-wing talking points.

This depressing landscape makes it almost impossible to imagine thinkers like Berger being afforded the same platform that they were in the postwar era. However, as Overton’s vibrant biography reminds us, it is exactly this kind of thinker that we need now more than ever.