On Good Friday in 2008 John Berger went to the National Gallery in London to look at, and to draw, Christ Crucified by the early renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, a work he describes as “the most solitary painting of the scene that I know. The least allegorical.” Berger placed his small shoulder bag on the attendant’s chair in the corner of the room and began to draw with ink, wetting his index finger to smudge the lines and correct mistakes. Before long the attendant returned and asked Berger to remove his bag. Berger placed it on the floor at his feet and resumed drawing. The attendant said he couldn’t leave it on the floor. Berger explained that if he held it he would be unable to draw. The dispute escalated, and at some stage Berger exclaimed “fuck”. A supervisor was called who told Berger he had insulted a member of staff doing his job and had “shouted obscene words in a public institution”. He was escorted from the building: “I take it you know the way out, sir.”

Berger tells the anecdote in his new book published next month, Bento’s Sketchbook (Verso), which also contains his, hastily completed, drawing of the crucifixion. In the book the episode has a palpably allegorical tinge that – with all the correcting of the drawing – hints at wider notions of human error. But at face value it is emblematic of Berger’s career as combative art critic, radical writer and consistent challenger of institutional power. Here you have a snapshot not only of his relationship with art and the art world, but also of his relationship with society and authority in general.

Recounting the story at his home in Haute-Savoie in the French alps, Berger smiles at the comic aspects of the grand old man of British art being summarily booted out of the National Gallery. But he nevertheless displays a lingering anger at what he sees as the underlying reasons for the confrontation. “They kept saying it was a matter of security,” he says, sneeringly elongating the word in the idiosyncratically French-inflected accent he has acquired after living there for almost 50 years. “Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.”

Bento’s Sketchbook is a characteristically sui generis work, combining an engagement with the thought of the 17^th-century lens grinder, draughtsman and philosopher Baruch Spinoza with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches, through which Berger attempts to explore the world around him and his place within it. We observe the bullishly fit and active octogenarian Berger climbing peach trees in his alpine village, talking to immigrants in Parisian suburbs and municipal swimming pools, attaching himself to a guided tour of the Wallace collection and reflecting on the physical and political similarities between the American folk radical Woody Guthrie and the Russian writer Andrei Platonov: “both lent their voices to those without a voice, and both confronted rural poverty”.

“Spinoza has been in my head for a very long time,” he explains. “Reading Marx as an 18-year-old, I remember him responding to a game in which he was asked to name his favourite philosopher. He said ’Spinoza’. It is in some ways a strange book – it is not directly a study of Spinoza or directly a book about drawing. I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible. It’s no coincidence that Spinoza worked in the then new science of optics.”

The book’s design elegantly incorporates text, drawings and extracts from Spinoza and is “as complicated as Ways of Seeing was 40 years ago,” Berger says. “We had long conversations about the layout, about not using illustrations as they are traditionally used but rather letting them speak for themselves. In a way it was about jiggling with the conventions of what makes a book, all of which were things we talked about, albeit in a different spirit, with Ways of Seeing. So in a funny way I see it as possessing a family likeness. Its character is different, but it is definitely related.”

Ways of Seeing, Berger’s 1972 book and TV series, was a Marxist riposte to Kenneth Clark’s patrician Civilisation. It exposed Berger and the ideas that underpinned the programmes – both then known only in left-wing and art circles – to a mass audience. The same year his experimental novel, G, won the Booker prize and he was further thrust into the limelight when he donated half the prize money to the Black Panther movement as a protest against Booker’s long history of involvement in Caribbean trade. (The gesture, “typical of him”, says his friend the writer and critic Geoff Dyer, “annoyed the right because he gave them half the money, and it annoyed the left because he only gave them half the money”.) Since then he has produced novels, plays, poetry, translations, criticism and journalism as well as collaborating with film-makers, photographers, actors, directors and other artists and activists across a range of artistic and political projects.

In a sense Bento’s Sketchbook is a collaboration with Spinoza, and Berger says he hopes the reader will regard the Spinoza that emerges “as a companion, in some ways a contemporary, to us. We’re not facing the same world as him, but in many ways it is similar, and his precise rejection of the Cartesian distinction between the physical and the spiritual seems to me more and more relevant to the crisis the world is now going through. Without wishing to idealise or simplify too much, we see some signs of its manifestation at the moment in north Africa, where the uprisings are, of course, concerned with the material conditions of the people. But there is also a more elevated spiritual vision. The two combined in Egypt and Tunisia to give the people their extraordinary sense of calm.”

In Berger’s kitchen is an etching of the angel announcing to the shepherds the birth of Christ, which he made when he was a teenage militant left-wing activist. He says he has never practised any religion but over the years has had close friendships with many people who do, including the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s brother, who was a monk in a nearby monastery in France. “And from about the age of 14 two things have coexisted within me. On the one hand a kind of materialism, which includes the Marxist view of history. On the other a sense of the sacred, the religious if you like. This duality never felt contradictory to me, but most other people thought it was. It is beautifully resolved by Spinoza, who shows that it is not a duality, but in fact an essential unity.”

Berger was born in London in 1926. His father, of Hungarian origin via Trieste, went on to become an early proponent of management theory, but his experiences in the first world war cast a pall over the home. His mother was from a working-class Bermondsey family and had been a suffragette in her youth. Berger was sent away to boarding school – “monstrous and brutal” – where he found comfort in art. “When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.” And with his interest in art came the development of his critical faculties. “I absolutely detested the pre-Raphaelites. Unjustly, I now think. It was something to do with their religiosity as I saw it. But Rembrandt was very important to me and what were then the moderns – Matisse, Modigliani.”

At 16 Berger left school and enrolled at the Central School of Art, where he encountered “older painters and teachers”. Lucian Freud was there briefly at the same time. “I’m not saying we predicted what would happen with his career, but equally it is not that much of a surprise. He was an outstanding student, and it was clear that he was very gifted and also very confident.”

In 1944 Berger was conscripted into the army for two years, after which he returned to art school at Chelsea, where he studied and then taught. His move into art criticism came when he was invited to give a series of short presentations about paintings from the National Gallery to the west African section of the BBC radio service. “I enjoyed writing, so I went to Tribune, then being edited by George Orwell, with these BBC scripts as my references.” He went on to write for the New Statesman, where he was taken under the wing of editor Kingsley Martin, who “was a kind of ally against opposition both inside and outside the office. But I had realised very early on that if you are attacking the status quo, whether that be the art world or the political and social status quo, then you expect to be attacked back. In a certain sense it is confirmation that you are on the right track.”

Over the years since Berger has been involved in many public debates and controversial political campaigns. “But I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement. From the outside that might look like confidence, but from the inside it feels like something different.”

In the mid 1950s, Berger made the decision to abandon painting to write full time. “Painting is something that you need to do if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist, if you stop you lose something. The phrase ’Sunday painter’ is not often a compliment. I was attracted to the novel form because I was attracted to the mystery of a person’s subjectivity and behaviour, their destinies and choices. The things that can’t be schematised. The challenge is to try not just to explain the mystery, but to ensure the mystery is shared and doesn’t remain isolated.”

He has gone on to write a dozen novels, most recently the Booker-longlisted A-X in 2008, but his career almost ended after his first novel. A Painter in Time (1958), about a Hungarian émigré returning to Budapest in 1956, received such condemnation for being apparently too much of an apologia for Stalin’s invasion of Hungary that Stephen Spender even urged Berger’s publisher to withdraw it. The row had a traumatic effect on Berger, “although it also toughened me up as to what I might expect in the future”.

He had, he says, never felt entirely comfortable in England, and his first book – a monograph published in German about the Sicilian communist painter and friend of Picasso, Renato Gattuso – had seen him introduced to the European left. So in the early 1960s he moved to France. He met Beverly Bancroft in the early 70s when working on Ways of Seeing, and they have lived in Haute-Savoie ever since. He has two children from previous relationships and, with Beverly, a son, Yves, who lives with his family in the same village. At the time there was some scoffing at Berger going off to play at being a peasant, but while in France he wrote the Into Their Labours trilogy of novels, addressing practical, political and personal aspects of peasant life. He then devoted the other half of his Booker prize money to funding a collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr that became their 1975 polemic about immigrant workers in Europe, The Seventh Man.

“At art school most of my friends had been older than me and most of them were political émigrés from fascism. So as a young man I would spend my evenings with them, and although I have more often written about economic migration, this whole question of what is home and what is homelessness, and how it can be transcended or not, was all around me.” He says he and Mohr were aware that economic migration was a growing global issue and is delighted that after over 30 years the book has just been published for the first time in Mexico, “the place of emigration, which gives me a gratifying feeling that the book has at last returned to what it was originally about.”

In Mexico Berger met, wrote about and drew the Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos. Other causes with which he has been associated include fighting political repression in Turkey and the plight of the Palestinian people. In 2009 he co-translated, with Rema Hammami, and illustrated Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural. These days, he says, he collaborates as much as he works alone. In the Bergers’ garden in the Alps is a small, rather decorative outside lavatory that houses a photographic gallery of visitor-collaborators including Simon McBurney of Complicite Theatre Company (who is also godfather to one of Yves’s children), Tilda Swinton and Michael Ondaatje.

“The only rule in collaborations is that one should never strike deals and never compromise,” he says. “If you disagree on something you shouldn’t yield and you shouldn’t insist on winning. Instead you should just accept that the solution is not right and carry on until it is right. The temptation to say ’you can have this one and I will have the next one’ is fatal.”

Another recent visitor to the house was an archivist from the British Library manuscripts department, to which he has donated his papers. (The deal was that the archivist would have to help with the harvest while he was in the village sorting through the box files that Beverly has kept for the last 40 years.) With his 2009 Golden PEN award for a lifetime’s distinguished service to literature, there is a sense of a new, semi-official acceptance and recognition.

“I just keep on writing and thinking and drawing, which I continued even after I stopped painting. I don’t know whether this is true for other people, but it is certainly true for me, that after years and years of drawing it does become a little easier. Unlike writing, which remains as difficult as ever. So while I’m at the stage of a new writing project where I am vaguely hearing, rather deafly, the demands of a new train of thought, the drawing goes on every day. It is that rare thing that gives you a chance of a very close identification with something, or somebody, who is not you. So maybe it is not so different from storytelling after all.”

Nicholas Wroe