John Livesey’s review of Tom Overton’s John Berger From Life (Allen Lane, 2026) is a good excuse to remember how improbable Berger’s career was. A self-professed Marxist art critic became a national television phenomenon in Britain — and did it in a 10 p.m. Saturday slot, right after the football scores.

Ways of Seeing (BBC, 1972) dismantled the “great man” theory of art for a mass audience. Berger, in a patterned shirt with a mane of gray hair, looked more like a rock star than an art historian, explaining Lukács, Gramsci, and Benjamin in plainspoken English. His question was never “is this good” but rather how economic forces determine what meanings art is allowed to produce.

That same year he won the Booker Prize for G. and used the acceptance speech to denounce literary prizes entirely:

  • He pledged half the winnings to the British Black Panther Party, which had two years earlier helped lead the campaign in solidarity with the Mangrove Nine — activists falsely accused of inciting a riot in 1970
  • He reportedly left the ceremony for a pub in north London, handed the money over, and toasted the Panthers
  • He was scathing about Abstract Expressionism, dismissing Jackson Pollock as unable to “see or think beyond the decadence of the culture to which he belongs”

The parts of Berger that retrospectives tend to skip are the parts Livesey insists on. He moved to Geneva in 1962 and to the alpine village of Quincy in 1974, and the chosen remoteness did not soften him: The Seventh Man (1975) documented Europe’s migrant workers with photographer Jean Mohr, and Keeping a Rendezvous defended Britain’s striking miners against Thatcherism — “They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home.”

His commitment to Palestinian liberation was among the most neglected. “I’m not ashamed of being a Jew,” he wrote to Philip O’Connor in 1967, “but I’m profoundly ashamed of Israel.” In the 2003 essay “A Moment in Ramallah,” he reads portraits of the dead of the second intifada the way he once read Rembrandt — then inventories the asymmetry outright. Apache and Cobra helicopters, F-16s, tanks, tear gas; on the other side catapults, slingshots, mobile phones, “badly used Kalashnikovs and, mostly, handmade explosives.” For once, the critic is out of words.

Overton’s biography does not tidy him into a hero. Four marriages, three children, and partners abandoned with what Livesey calls “seemingly casual disdain” — Overton quotes Rosemary Guest describing her divorce papers as a “death warrant,” and gives the same space to Anya Bostock and Beverly Bancroft. Laura Mulvey credited Berger with inspiring her work on the male gaze; his own life sat uneasily with the politics he professed. Overton offers credit for the self-awareness and sympathy for the man’s impatience with monogamy, then declines to excuse the wreckage.

The closing argument is the sharpest part. In 1972 a publicly funded broadcaster handed a Marxist art show a national platform. In 2026 the same BBC faces privatization threats and a “political neutrality” line that Livesey calls a euphemism for accommodating right-wing talking points. The climate that produced Berger is gone — which is, per Overton, precisely why we need that kind of thinker now.