Paul Pickering – författare

Formed in 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most important campaigns to introduce the ideas of economic liberalism into mainstream political discourse in Britain. Its aspiration for free trade played a crucial role in defining the agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism and shaping the modern British state. Its faith in the free market still resonates in Britain''s public policy debates today. This is the first comprehensive study of the League which makes use of recent methodological developments in social history.

Formed in 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most important campaigns to introduce the ideas of economic liberalism into mainstream political discourse in Britain. Seeking the abolition of a tariff barrier that buttressed the economic and political power of the land-owning aristocracy, the League presented itself as the vanguard of the emerging industrial middle class in Victorian Britain. Its aspiration for free trade played a crucial role in defining the agenda of 19th-century liberalism and shaping the modern British state. The League's faith in the free market has had resonances in the debates debates over public policy in Britain during recent years, and it also set the pattern for individuals and groups which have stood outside the Establishment articulating alternative visions of society. This study of the Anti-Corn Law League makes use of recent methodological developments in social history.

Now a famous classical pianist, S. Miles-Harcourt, aka “Smiles,” arrives in Congo to play a Peace and Reconciliation Concert, and to make amends with his former schoolteacher and mentor, Lyman Andrew, who has buried himself in the war-torn jungle. Smiles owes his success to the man he helped ruin and harbors a dark secret from his brutal public school days. But a bomb has exploded at the hotel in Kinshasa where Smiles was due to play, and in an unsettling turn of events he is invited to his own funeral. When coffins are broken open by the Garde Républicaine and Smiles is not in his, he is suspected of being one of the rebels. He escapes on a ramshackle boat with the grand piano meant for his recital, which is now destined for his teacher, living more than a thousand miles upriver–a world outside time, where Smiles witnesses the miracles and the terrors of Congo as he plays Beethoven in a forest haunted by nameless atrocities. He is escorted by Lola, the wife of a feared Congolese military officer–even the leopard has a wife, says a Swahili proverb– and her adolescent brother; in the course of their journey, Smiles and Lola fall in love, and Lola’s brother discovers Smiles’s diary and the barbaric past it hides. But all the while an ever vengeful leopard is following . . . Author Paul Pickering’s arresting prose is awash in sound–from sensuous piano strains to the crack of a rifle, the echo of footsteps, the rumble of tribal drums, the deafening roar of a waterfall; in Congo, each can mean the difference between life and death, joy and sorrow. Set in the contrasting landscapes of the African jungle and picturesque English countryside, The Leopard’s Wife is a searing look at the racial tensions and societal discontents of two vastly different cultures, and it reveals the uncivilized cruelty and tender mercies shared so commonly by both.

In a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus. But a hundred years later an American academic feels the boy may have invented the elephant as the only kind and uplifting being in dark times.

Paul Pickering’s new anti-war novel Lucy is about obedience and rebellion, how one survivor in the actual and moral wasteland of immediate post-war Berlin takes over the lives of three others, psychologically and sexually, in the way Hitler took over a country.The worldwide protests surrounding the 2024 conflict in Gaza mirror the rebel spirit at the heart of Pickering’s important, groundbreaking novel. Set partly in a German kibbutz, started by Nazis to remove Jews, there is a clash between utopian ideas and the toxic nationalism necessary to found the state of Israel. Operation Lucy, once an idealistic, anti-Nazi espionage ring, of which all the main characters are part, has become a self-devouring monster. Lucy is darkly comic, showing how best intentions, when they pass through the looking-glass of human failings, change to the opposite. Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” means no escape because of contradictory rules, “Lucy” is the Lucifer paradox, where the only good is bad, and only bad is good.A thrilling, disturbing and utterly compelling read from one of the UK’s most celebrated authors.

The Leopard's Wifeis a novel of love in an impossible land. Smiles, a famous concert pianist and English public school boy, wants to make amends with his African-American schoolmaster, Lyman Andrew, who has buried himself in the war-torn jungle of the Congo. Smiles owes his success to the man he helped ruin and harbors a dark secret from the past and his brutal public school. But a bomb has exploded at a hotel in Kinshasa where Smiles was due to play at a peace and reconciliation concert and he is accidentally invited to his own funeral. Coffins are broken open by the Presidential Guard and when he is not in his, Smiles is suspected of being one of the rebels. He escapes on a ramshackle boat with the grand piano meant for his recital, which is now destined for his old schoolmaster, who lives near Kisangani, more than a thousand miles upriver, where the rebel forces are gathering and exiles are fleeing the war in the east. On the way he falls in love with Lola, the beautiful wife of Xavier, the head of the Presidential Guard and the Leopard of the title - even the leopard has a wife, says a Swahili proverb - and Smiles begins to appreciate anew the majesty of creation and the Congo as he brings Beethoven into the atrocity haunted forest. But all the time the Leopard is following . . .

It is September 2009, Ramadan and the eve of Afghanistan's first 'democratic' elections when young American Malone, pilot for an aid airline, does Fatima Hamza the favour of flying her out of Kabul to Bamiyan, while his surgeon wife Kim heads south to Kandahar. The beguiling, Oxford-educated Pashtun Fatima has left Pakistan to rediscover the country she comes from, she tells him, to retrace the places that were important to her spy-chief father, ex-military man and writer with a disturbing gift of prophecy. For both Kim and Malone, the foray into that dangerous territory is to become a prolonged adventure, their former lives receding as they lose touch with one another and enter the world of the enemy. Each is to witness the horror of an air raid, and each is to come face-to-face with the Taliban. They will glimpse hell, but paradise, too, and be changed. In this powerful novel, Paul Pickering gives a human face to the conflict in Afghanistan, capturing the magical quality of a land and its people.