John Berger: A radical returns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/apr/03/art.art1


"The controversial success of Ways of Seeing was followed by his sole excursion into post-modernist fiction with G, an experimental novel that won him the fledgling Booker Prize. Long before the stage-managed hysteria that now surrounds the Booker, Berger created a storm of controversy by using his acceptance speech to castigate Booker McConnell for their historical trading interests in the West Indies, then announced that he was donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. One of the Panthers accompanied him to the event, he admitted later, and, ironically, seemed rattled by the passionate intensity of Berger's speech, whispering 'Keep it cool, man, keep it cool' throughout."




" 'What seems to have been abandoned of late,' he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, 'and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it's there in my work.' "