Mick Hartley

Sean O’Hagan fawns over John Berger, the grand old man of British Radical Chic:

From the off, he sweeps you off your feet. Here is Berger on smoking, which he does with the fierce enjoyment of a true addict. ‘A cigarette’, he says, inhaling deeply, ‘is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are both in that parenthesis. It’s like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.’

How many interviewees, I wonder, if they insisted on smoking, would be portrayed so heroically?

He looks a good 15 years younger than his age, which, unbelievably, is 78, and possesses the kind of contagious energy and creative curiosity one usually encounters only in the very young or indefatigably idealistic. In this, he reminds me, of all people, of Bono: the same hunger for stimulation, the same easy grace, the same seemingly undimmable optimism about a world that seems for ever to be testing the limits of that faith.

And so on, and on…ending on this elegiac note:

‘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.’

It’s there of course, in abundance, a reminder of what those of us who still adhere to a liberal-left world view have lost, have surrendered, and must surely rediscover if only in order to be heard.

Solidarity? Well, it depends who you want to show solidarity with. Michael Moore, yes:

Fahrenheit 9/11 is astounding. Not so much as a film – although it is cunning and moving – but as an event.

Salman Rushdie, after the fatwa? A fellow author threatened with death for what he’d written? No. Berger was one of those who went public to denounce Rushdie for offending that nice Ayatollah Khomeini.

And he’s a reminder of what those of us who still adhere to a liberal-left world view have lost? You should be so lucky.