The cultural critic John Berger was still alive and kicking when he donated his literary archive – heaped boxes of letters and notepads, sketches and scripts – to the British Library in 2009. When Overton sought permission to write Berger’s biography, though, the critic insisted that he wait a few years. That’s certainly the case with John Berger: From Life. By the end of his life, Overton notes, the man’s spoken English has taken on the grammatical patterns of French. Overton is a writer in part because of reading John Berger.