WHEN novelist, poet, artist and art writer John Berger died in 2017, I thought there should be a John Berger Society. After all, Thomas Hardy, Daphne Du Maurier and many other writers have one, with their membership events, huddles of aficionados and all that, yet Berger, one of the major European intellectuals of our time, had not. 

How to do it? Maybe it would confine him to memory, and not a presence. There’d be no point in historicising him, and he speaks to young people today, particularly through Ways of Seeing. And he would have hated the idea of it anyway. 

Yet after attending a superb film on migration and its human toll: “Surrender — Ways of Hearing John Berger” at the British Library last July, I invited executive producer Tina Grace to partner in establishing a sort of JB Soc, but to call it something else. The title of the project is therefore The Shape of a Pocket, named after one of Berger’s collections of essays and, as his film-maker Ways of Seeing partner, Mike Dibb said: “John Berger belongs to everyone,” and so everyone is a member.