Nick Buckley MBE came to international attention in June 2020 when he was fired by the board of The Mancunian Way, a charity he had founded, for criticizing the far-left policies of Black Lives Matter. He then mounted a successful fightback that resulted in his reinstatement and the resignation of the board who had fired him. Buckley had spent two decades preventing youth crime, homelessness, and antisocial behaviour in the UK's toughest neighborhoods. In 2019 he was awarded the MBE for his work with Mancunian Way, which promotes early intervention and personal responsibility. Buckley was a social campaigner for issues that keep people in poverty feeling victimized. But when he found himself cancelled, he felt his life was destroyed. Slowly becoming poisoned by the toxicity of self-pity, he decided he needed to give himself a good talking to. He was lucky. It had been his career to give people a good talking to, and he was good at it. He took his own medicine and got his life back within weeks. In Lessons in Courage, Buckley argues that in our febrile cultural climate we increasingly need people to be courageous and to do what is right, not what is convenient or acceptable to fashionable ideologues. Buckley sets out a series of lessons learned throughout his life, not having realized that he was in training for a life-defining battle. These are the tough but inspiring lessons he wants to offer the next person to face an angry and intolerant mob and to others who self-censor or hold back for fear of drowning in turbulent waters.

Nick Buckley MBE explores the relationship between "givers" and "takers," and the damaging symbiotic relationship between them. He examines the motivation of disheveled individuals sitting on street corners holding out paper cups, as well as the intergenerational problem of poverty and welfare dependency. Different types of beggars are highlighted, such as politicians begging for votes, charities begging for donations, and even the woke begging for validation and attention. Buckley shows that begging is a complicated topic, part nature and part nurture, and that many engage in such behavior unknowingly. Unlike most authors on this topic, Buckley explores his own history of begging from being raised in a workless household on benefits, to claiming unemployment benefits as an adult, and the journey that eventually led him to found an award-winning charity. Buckley offers us an antidote to such unbecoming behavior: personal responsibility.