The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

John Berger taught a generation to look at paintings and then to distrust the people selling them.

He won the Booker Prize in 1972 and used his acceptance speech to criticise the sponsor, then gave half the money to the Black Panthers. He made a name for himself as the New Statesman's art critic.

This week marks what would have been his one hundredth birthday. He left us in 2017, but his cultural footprint looms large - new generations finding him through mediums even he wouldn't have foreseen.

Tom Overton has spent fifteen years reckoning with that legacy - starting even before Berger died. He started as the archivist cataloguing Berger’s papers at the British Library, and ended up on the receiving end of late-night phone calls that began, “This is John. John Berger.” Now he’s written the biography: John Berger: From Life.

So what do you do with a hundred years of Berger? Who was he, and why do we still need his company?
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Four hundred years on, we still can’t stop reading about the Tudors, and nobody has fed that habit better than Philippa Gregory.

Often called the queen of British historical fiction, Gregory has sold millions of books by asking who history forgot and who it blamed.

She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of The New Society to discuss her life, career, the forgotten women of history and why history has become so culturally in demand.
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In this week’s magazine, we published an open letter, signed by over 150 leading authors, artists and public figures, titled “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”.

https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/10/sally-rooney-is-a-writer-not-a-terrorist

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Megan Gibson to discuss why the New Statesman published this open letter in support of Sally Rooney.
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Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.

Can we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from?

These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy. In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories but is one interconnected web of relations, where things are defined by how they interact with everything else.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Carlo Rovelli.
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You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.

That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing on the shift from private to public knowledge, and how this can suddenly change behaviours or even start revolutions.

Steven Pinker joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss.
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