Paul Pickering - Böcker

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.

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.