SOURCE: “Agreeing with Berger,” in London Review of Books, March 19, 1987, pp. 9–10.

In the following review of Ways of Telling, Campbell discusses the career and influence of John Berger.

John Berger is 60. He is not forgotten. Permanent Red, his criticism from the Fifties, is in print. Ways of Seeing is the antidote put in the hands of students who have drunk too deeply of Courtauld art history. His novels, too, have created a stir. His first, A Painter of Our Time, had such vitriolic reviews that the publishers withdrew it, and G won the Booker Prize: Berger's hard swallow on that sugarplum made him briefly notorious. His behaviour was un-English—but that was to be expected, for his work had never fitted English pigeonholes. In A Fortunate Man he and Jean Mohr produced a report from rural England which, like Let us now praise famous men, Agee's report from...