John Berger’s death in 2017, aged 90, prompted wide reappraisal of his achievements in making art criticism accessible, and his longstanding championing of radical and/or proletarian causes: he represents a mid-20th century archetype, like Tony Benn, of a left-winger who uses his class privileges to uplift those less fortunate. The seven years hence hasn’t seen an especially feral excavation of the Berger archives, but The Underground Sea collects rarely-seen work by him on the topic of coal mining, evidently with the 40th anniversary of the British workforce’s most epochal strike in mind.

Following an introduction by the book’s editors Tom Overton and Matthew Harle, we encounter Berger’s fiery keynote text written for a 1989 exhibition titled Miners; selections, in the form of scripts and stills, from his 1972 BBC programme Germinal (inspired by Émile Zola’s novel of that title, itself inspired by a French miners’ strike); a full transcript of an interview Berger conducted with Joe Roberts, a retired coal miner from Lancashire, for a 1963 Granada TV show Before My Time; and an essay, ‘The Nature Of Mass Demonstrations’, penned in 1968 as social unrest became globally contagious. The words are invariably sage, the language noble yet pointedly accessible, and Roberts’ descriptions of intense poverty and extraordinarily dangerous work are powerful, and helped by Berger’s manner of questioning.

All this amounts to 120 pages, about 13,000 words and a book you can comfortably finish in an afternoon: The Underground Sea’s dust jacket calls it “succinct”, the sort of linguistic creativity more commonly employed by letting agents. I was left moved by much of the content herein – and left unconvinced that it’s been presented in the ideal format.