Signal A Running Record of Findings from the Internet / September 29, 2026

Tom Overton Spent Years Inside John Berger's Papers

Overton was John Berger's archivist and editor, and Scott Schomburg gets him to describe what that access did to the man who wrote Ways of Seeing. The conversation runs from the 1972 Booker speech, where Berger gave half the prize money to the British Black Panthers, through to the ordinary business of handling a dead writer's boxes and deciding what a paper trail is actually evidence of. It is a working account of the archive as a place rather than a metaphor.

Read the story By Scott Schomburg · The Paris Review
Tom Overton Spent Years Inside John Berger's Papers
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