The Shape of a Pocket

No other collection by British art critic and Booker Prize-winning writer John Berger speaks about art and politics with such a strong desire for change.

Berger himself described The Shape of a Pocket (2001) as deeply personal and written out of an urgent necessity. With his characteristic attentiveness and critical perspective, Berger writes about Bosch, Rembrandt, Degas, Kahlo, Fayum portraits and cave paintings, using them to reflect on the suffocation of the present, economic inequality and the claustrophobia of a globalized world.

Gathering essays written between 1991 and 2000, the book seeks forms of resistance to the failures of the modern world and searches for possibilities of other spaces and other worlds — one of them being the intimate space held between reader and author.