What John Berger Saw That We Still Don’t, with Tom Overton

**Tom Overton** (0:01)
The Perfect Lunch Combo.
That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice-cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better.

**Shahidha Bari** (0:15)
Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:19)
Food deserves Pepsi.

**Tom Overton** (0:21)
Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. What does it mean to really look at a work of art? And more than 50 years after Ways of Seeing, what can John Berger still teach us about the relationship between culture, politics, and power?
On today's episode, Tom Overton, writer, editor, and researcher, joined Shahidha Bari to discuss his new book, John Berger, From Life, and the ideas, political commitments, and collaborations that shaped one of the most influential cultural thinkers of the 20th century. Let's join our host, Shahidha Bari, now with more.

**Shahidha Bari** (1:00)
Hello, I'm Shahidha Bari, and I'm talking to Tom Overton today about his new book, John Berger, From Life. John Berger was one of the artistic polymaths of the 20th century, our cultural life. He was a painter, a novelist, a poet, a critic, a broadcaster, and perhaps above all other things, a storyteller. Many people will remember his 1972 television series, Ways of Seeing, and how that transformed the generations of people, the way that they thought about art, challenging the authority of the museum and the art historian and the supposedly neutral act of looking. But Berger's interests ranged far beyond paintings, too. He wrote about migration and labour, peasants and animals, politics and war.
And he wrote about mortality. His book, a prize-winning novel, G, is an extraordinary book about a country doctor, a fortunate man.
And this is just part of a remarkably wide body of work. Berger died in 2017, aged 90 But in a sense, he'd already begun arranging his afterlife. And in 2009, he gave his literary archive to the British Library. And the person to whom that stuff landed was Tom Overton, the young curator who catalogued that archive. And it began an encounter with Berger's papers and a very extraordinary relationship with him. And this book is in some ways a biography, but also an exploration of the life and work. And you, Tom, are also in it in some ways, this inquiring voice, even addressing Berger sometimes directly in the book. I wondered if we might start by talking about how the book came about and how you would describe it as a project.

**Tom Overton** (2:52)
Hello, nice to meet you.
Well, it started, as you said, it started when John donated his archive to the British Library in 2009 And I saw all of the media around that, and I heard a thing on the radio, and I thought, I'd love to see some of the archive. And I went on the British Library website in the expectation of being able to call some of it up to a reading room and I actually saw what was actually a kind of job advert to work on the archive as part of a PhD. And I took a punt on that and was very surprised to get it. And I started, so I went to the British Library to start work and started going through all of these boxes, which were then in, they were still in a kind of quarantine, some of them, because they had been kept in a barn and they had various bugs in them. Some of them were in plastic, sort of plastic bags and it looked quite zombie film-esque. And then when I got some of that, the boxes, they smelled very strongly of cigarettes. And I started to, because of the life that these boxes had led, and then I started to realize that there were lots of things in there that I didn't know what they were.
But there were these beautiful images, often on the top of a lot of the stacks of drafts for his books. And they, he often had, you could see there was a drawing pinhole at the sort of the dead center of the top. And I was like, I wonder if he had that above his desk when he started writing. And it makes sense if you read his work, that he had such a visual imagination. And I could sort of imagine him sort of sticking it up and then sort of producing, you know, he's getting his imagination going in front of that. And I thought, well, that's quite a good model for how I might maybe start talking to him. So I got in the habit of scanning things in and sending them to Beverly, his wife, the person who really put that archive into order. And he didn't really use it. He wrote one email, which is actually in the archive.