Liverpool Quotes

Have you ever met someone for the first time, but in your heart you feel as if you’ve met them before?

If you have a dad who supports Liverpool you always fucking think you can turn anything around. You know! Ever since that Champions League final.

This city has two great teams - Liverpool and Liverpool reserves.

I think the music reflects the state that the society is in. It doesn't suggest the state. I think the poets and musicians and artists are of the age - not only do they lead the age on, but they also reflect that age. [...] Like The Beatles. We came out of Liverpool and we reflected our background and we reflected our thoughts in what we sang, and that's all people are doing.

George: 'Ringo would always say grammmatically incorrect phrases and we'd all laugh. I remember when we were driving back to Liverpool from Luton up the M1 motorway in Ringo's Zephyr, and the car's bonnet hadn't been latched properly. The wind got under it and blew it up in front of the windscreen. We were all shouting, 'Aaaargh!' and Ringo calmly said, 'Don't worry, I'll soon have you back in your safely-beds.

...the Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia--a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys--they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles--not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.

Mr Norrell was very well pleased. Lord Liverpool was exactly the sort of guest he liked – one who admired the books but shewed no inclination to take them down from the shelves and read them.

He was Sudeten German—Arkansas to their Manhattan, Liverpool to their Cambridge.

George Harrison: The day after the Blue Angel audition, John showed up to rehearsal with a long list of name suggestions, and I remember each and every one of them: the Deads-men, the Deadmen, the Undeads-men, the Undeadmen, the Rots, the Rotters, the Dirts, the Dirty Ones, the Grayboys, the Eaten Brains, the Eating Brains, the Mersey Beaters, the Mersey Beaten, the Bloodless, the Graves, the Headstones, and the Liverpools of Blood. Paul ripped off John's right arm and used it to slap John across the face, then he said, "Those're horrible, mate, just horrible, y'know.

Sebastian Grey. The worrds rang like a miserable moan in her head. On the list of men she ought not to be kissing, he had to rank at the top, along with the King, Lord Liverpool, and the chimney sweep.

The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty ... it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London

Bands like The Move, Traffic and The Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful.

A good day's filming at last... John Horton's rabbit effects are superb. A really vicious white rabbit, which bites Sir Bor's head off. Much of the ground lost over the week is made up. We listen to the Cup Final in between fighting the rabbit -- Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-0.

A shaft of sunlight pierced the dark cluds and she looked up to see a silver lining. It was a sign, she thought.

The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: "It's a just reparation which will be paid to us.

[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

When I was six, Hitler, who had become rather a nuisance, launched a sustained attempt to destroy Liverpool, and though we lived several miles from the vulnerable docks target, our Childwall suburb became too close for comfort and safety.

America’s first Sunday school had been founded in Savannah in 1736, America’s first orphanage in 1740, America’s first black Baptist congregation in 1788, America’s first golf course in 1796. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had been the minister of Christ Church in Savannah in 1736, and during his tenure had written a book of hymns that became the first hymnal used in the Church of England. A Savannah merchant had bankrolled the first steamship ever to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah, which made its maiden ocean voyage from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.

About half of them were from offices in Liverpool; the rest from London offices. Their military training had begun nine months before, they said, when the war started. But it had not, as you could see, made up for the bad diet, the lack of fresh air and sun and physical training, of the post-war years. Thirty yards away German infantry were marching up the road towards the front. I could not help comparing them with these British lads. The Germans, bronzed, clean-cut physically, healthy-looking as lions, chests developed and all. It was part of the unequal fight. The

next up was my spiritual home of liverpool.great show.magnificent crowd.they never let you down those scousers.while im at it let me say i am writing this on the day that THE TRUTH has finally been exposed about the hillsborough disaster.respect to all the familys of the 96 for exposing the lies of thatchers government.with hand on heart i salute you.xxxxxx

William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

there till we reached Liverpool—I never saw him.  His mother, after a little, at his request, left him alone. 

Sir Thomas Beecham once said this at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall when I was there as a boy. He said ‘I’m often asked why operas survive generation after generation—La Bohème and things like that. And I always reply. ‘They survive because they consist of bloody good tunes’.

We are entrusted, you must know, with the revision of the English Dictionary. On the evidence of the Liverpool find of Christmas cards, in which occurred such couplets as: Just to hope the day keeps fine For you and your this Christmas time, and: I hope this stocking's in your line When stars shine bright at Christmas-time I hold that "Christmas-time" was often pronounced "Christmas-tine", and that this is a dialect variant of the older "Christmas-tide". Quant denies this, with a warmth that is unusual in him.' 'Quant is right.

The sun of Sunday morning up out of the sleepless sea from black Liverpool. Sitting on the rocks over the water with a jug of coffee. Down there along the harbor pier, trippers in bright colors. Sails moving out to sea. Young couples climbing the Balscaddoon Road to the top of Kilrock to search out grass and lie between the furze. A cold green sea breaking whitely along the granite coast. A day on which all things are born, like uncovered stars.

Like many other who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d’Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love.

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.

Wearing your red scarves, your Liverpool scarves. To support Liverpool Football Club. So I thank you, boys. I thank you. For supporting Liverpool Football Club. Because we could do nothing without you, boys – We would be nothing without you.

Starting with religion, as the British historian Hugh Thomas noted in his monumental study The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870, “There is no record in the seventeenth century of any preacher who, in any sermon, whether in the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux, or in a Presbyterian meeting house in Liverpool, condemned the trade in black slaves.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn’t, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum. Hawthorne under questioning admitted that he hadn’t actually read it. “This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as [I] live,” he vowed in a letter to a friend.

An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where ‘a club’s rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation’. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word ‘rival’.

I’ve spent my creative life so far first in the theatre, then on the page, then on the screen, examining what is turning out as I grow older to look like one enormous landscape. What I originally thought were different worlds turn out to be one interconnected place. And like a bedspread viewed by a sick child from his pillow, I am very aware that there are colours in various corners which I know very well, but I haven’t yet found the ways to get from the blue to the green and from the green to the red. I’ve just begun, and I suppose that’s become my preoccupation – the idea that at one point I will see it clearly.

The military put up barricades around the areas of the cities where the infections broke out. That was the way the first Coldtowns were founded. Vampirism is an American problem, the BBC declared. But the next outbreak was in Hong Kong, then Yokohama, then Marseille, then Brecht, then Liverpool. After that, it spread across Europe like wildfire.

Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

..here is not the world. Here is a place where there is no work or homework, where people do not judge each other, and where they do not try to outdo each other.

Darkness is the womb from which a poet is born.

We're all selfish. It's an age thing. We go spotty, disobedient and daft. But most of all, we go selfish

was

To hold the courage to let another witness our tears, while refuting fears invitation to shield face, is to grant the most privileged of all loving intimacies to them.

Endings and beginnings are merely paired facets of an imagined stone curtain, behind which a plethora of opportunities await.

If people are talking about the past instead of future, if they start to tell about their memories instead of dreams, it means they are getting older.

Why would you need to melt to enlighten people like a candle? Every move you make gives an ironic smile to others, that's all.

Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship

On 15 September 1830, the first commercial railway line was opened, connecting Liverpool with Manchester.

For the first time since its birth in Britain’s industrial dawn, Liverpool was deliberately invoked as a source of excitement, glamour, and novelty.

They are both from the Guion Steamship Company, and refer to the sailing of their boats from Liverpool.

Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: “It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be off to Liverpool on their way to America at the rate of twenty miles an hour.” Babbage could only express the hope that science might yet find a remedy for the problem it had created.

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.

Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures, and honorary doctorate degrees from Manchester University and Liverpool University. ‘It is an utterly corrupt society,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘. . . & I will take nothing that it can give me

Another raid followed on January 31, during which nine airships flew as far as Liverpool, along the way sending terrifying shadows scudding across the landscape of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world’s first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity.

As soon as the robbery was discovered, picked detectives hastened off to Liverpool, Glasgow, Havre, Suez, Brindisi, New York, and other ports, inspired by the proffered reward of two thousand pounds, and five per cent.

The first question sobbed out by his choking voice, oppressed with emotion, was-- "Where is she?" They led him to the room where his mother sat. They had told her of her son's acquittal, and now she was laughing, and crying, and talking, and giving way to all those feelings which she had restrained with such effort during the last few days. They brought her son to her, and she threw herself upon his neck, weeping there. He returned her embrace, but looked around, beyond. Excepting his mother, there was no one in the room but the friends who had entered with him. "Eh, lad!" she said, when she found voice to speak. "See what it is to have behaved thysel! I could put in a good word for thee, and the jury could na go and hang thee in the face of th' character I gave thee. Was na it a good thing they did na keep me from Liverpool? But I would come; I knew I could do thee good, bless thee, my lad. But thou'rt very white, and all of a tremble." He kissed her again and again, but looking round as if searching for some one he could not find, the first words he uttered were still-- "Where is she?

I wish I could say, James, that we forgave each other in the end. I wish I could say: she put her head on my shoulder and I welcomed it and we laughed and said all was well. But in fact we were quiet for a long time, and we heard a television laughing across the road and the train leaving for Liverpool Street, and then she said, 'Do you think we can love each other and never ever forgive?' I didn't know, I said. But I thought we ought to try. (Thomas Hart)

Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains,

Who knew that after WWII, some 2,000 Chinese seamen in Liverpool who had helped in the war effort were deported ‘home’ without warning? This violation was so swift and hidden that for decades their British wives and families thought that they had simply been left.

You from?” the driver asked with a complete lack of interest. “Liverpool.” “Limey, huh? Well, you’ll be all right. It’s the goddamn New York Jews cause all the trouble.” I found myself with a British inflection and by no means one of Liverpool. “Jews—what? How do they cause trouble?” “Why, hell, mister. We know how to take care of this. Everybody’s happy and getting along fine. Why, I like niggers. And them goddamn New York Jews come in and stir the niggers up. They just stay in New York there wouldn’t be no trouble. Ought to take them out.

Men who love the Stones are fixated on cock. I’m sorry, but that’s the only word. And a firehose is a symbolic fantasy cock. It’s pathetic. Male Stones fans are frozen at eighteen months old, just discovering the thrill of yanking on the rubber band of their own phallus. Female Stones fans are even worse. Mick Jagger has a weird gross mouth that makes him look like a cod, and this turns them on. They’re sexually aroused by fish-men. They’re deviants.” “So what are Beatles fans fixated on? The glory of pussy?” “Exactly. Strawberry Fields is not just a place in Liverpool, Mr. Rookwood.

In one respect New Orleans has set an example for all the world in the fight against yellow fever. The first impression was the complete organization of the citizens and the rational and reasonable way in which the fight has been conducted by them. With a tangible enemy in view, the army of defense could begin to fight rationally and scientifically. The... spirit in which the citizens of New Orleans sallied forth to win this fight strikes one who has been witness to the profound gloom, distress, and woe that cloud every other epidemic city. Rupert Boyce, Dean of Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases, 1905

Goodbye and farewell, I'm going out to the sea, which is free and endless, rhythmic and swaying like the old sea chanteys sung across the oceans of the world on ships traveling to classic harbors like Marseille, Liverpool, Singapore, and Montevideo, while the deckhands hauled on the lines to set, trim, or reef the sails.

long. Trade has always traveled and the world has always traded. Ours, though, is the era of extreme interdependence. Hardly any nation is now self-sufficient. In 2011, the United Kingdom shipped in half of its gas. The United States relies on ships to bring in two-thirds of its oil supplies. Every day, thirty-eight million tons of crude oil sets off by sea somewhere, although you may not notice it. As in Los Angeles, New York, and other port cities, London has moved its working docks out of the city, away from residents. Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street.

But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning -- the city inhaling -- or the same thorough-fares in the evening -- the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.

For some strange reason there were various rumours about the pair of us fighting on the training pitch. It was always bollocks. I would get more pissed off that they always had Carra winning our imaginary fights. I’ll have to get the gloves on one night – especially now that Carra is sparring with Tony Bellew, one of our top boxers in Liverpool.

It is, as calls to arms go, straightforward. Crystal clear. And if you aren’t looking forward to Spurs and Kazan, to Southampton and Bournemouth, if that just doesn’t get you going, wanting to be emotional, unashamedly emotional, optimistic, passionate in a way that outsiders love to mock and our own meek minded souls call 'embarrassing' then you know what? There’s the door. There is the door, and you can walk through it, and both you and us will be happier for that. Because, for ninety minutes every few days, this fella represents Liverpool, eleven lads wearing Red represent Liverpool and we represent Liverpool. Wherever we are on globe, with an even greater responsibility if we are in the stadium.

Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself; the earth is explicable — from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning — the city inhaling — or the same thoroughfares in the evening — the city exhaling her exhausted air?

These eyes are a mysterious torch that illuminates the outside only. I always live in darkness, but my darkness is full of stars.

Men don’t get drunk from a really good wine but from a beautiful woman.

Time wipes successes that easily achieved and cheap.

When fair-play and the interests of the team conflict with each other, which one should you choose?

The idea of coming back to you was something like giving money to a beggar: a person feels bad himself if he gives money to a beggar or if he doesn’t do that

Most people dream in bed then let those dreams fade as the sun rises. Others chase their dreams to the moon and back.

I do so love hearing people speak passionately on any subject, other than themselves.

We all have the same pallet of emotional paints. It is how we pigment them on the canvas of life that dictates our artistry.

the youngsters to get some fresh air and run off some of

A crucial link in the spreading timetable system was public transportation. If workers needed to start their shift by 08:00, the train or bus had to reach the factory gate by 07:55. A few minutes’ delay would lower production and perhaps even lead to the lay-offs of the unfortunate latecomers. In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour. When it was 12:00 in London, it was perhaps 12:20 in Liverpool and 11:50 in Canterbury. Since there were no telephones, no radio or television, and no fast trains

if he dies, why, perhaps, God of His mercy will take me too. The grave is a sure cure for an aching heart!” She sank back in her chair, quite exhausted by the sudden effort she had made; but if they even offered to speak, she cut them short (whatever the subject might be), with the repetition of the same words, “I shall go to Liverpool.” No more could be said, the doctor’s opinion had

I chose to visit Charles on weekdays, when I knew Kyle would be in Liverpool. Yet, as the days on the calendar dwindled and my departure for London grew imminent, I allowed myself one final Saturday visit. I couldn’t bear to leave without seeing him one more time. But I wasn’t going to let him see me. I took Father’s Kodak from the closet in his library and hid it in the zippered compartment of my handbag

I’ve noticed that most Scottish people don’t inquire beyond “down south,” and I can only assume that this description encapsulates some sort of generic Englandshire for them, boat races and bowler hats, as though Liverpool and Cornwall were the same sorts of places, inhabited by the same sorts of people. Conversely, they are always adamant that every part of their own country is unique and special. I’m not sure why.

There is no God,’ the wicked saith, ‘And truly it’s a blessing, For what He might have done with us It’s better only guessing.’ ‘There is no God,’ a youngster thinks, ‘Or really, if there may be, He surely did not mean a man Always to be a baby.’ ‘There is no God, or if there is,’ The tradesman thinks, ‘’twere funny If He should take it ill in me To make a little money.’ Extract from Dipsychus, Part I by Arthur Hugh Clough

Ten years after the first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, the first train timetable was issued. The trains were much faster than the old carriages, so the quirky differences in local hours became a severe nuisance. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow. More and more institutions followed the lead of the train companies. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset

CHARLIE (Intently) You hate all white men, don’t you, Matoseh? TSHEMBE (A burst of laughter. Casting his eyes up) Oh, dear God, why? (He crosses down and away) Why do you all need it so?! This absolute lo-o-onging for my hatred! (A sad smile plays across his lips) I shall be honest with you, Mr. Morris. I do not “hate” all white men—but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves above Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the Metro at dawn and too many hungry Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever “loved” the white race either. I would like to be simple-minded for you, but—(Turning these eyes that have “seen” up to the other with a smile)—I cannot. I have—(He touches his brow)—seen.

In the port city of Liverpool, similar race hatred was gaining ground. Post-war employment was scarce, and over a hundred black factory workers suddenly and swiftly lost their jobs after white workers refused to work with them. On 4 June 1919, a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette. Numerous fights followed, with the police ransacking homes where they knew black people lived. The frenzy resulted in one of the most horrific race hate crimes in British history. Twenty-four-year-old black seaman Charles Wootton was accosted by an enraged white crowd and thrown into the King’s Dock. As he swam, desperately trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted with bricks until he sank under the surface. Some time later, his lifeless body was dragged out of the dock. It was a public lynching. The days after Charles Wootton’s murder saw white mob rule dominating Liverpool’s streets as they attacked any black person they saw.

Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,” Norman went on. “It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet an entrepreneur from Liverpool in Soho who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno but with other club owners as well. They kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...' Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?' Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.

But you don't think her fit to go to Liverpool?" asked Mary, still in the anxious tone of one who wishes earnestly for some particular decision. "To Liverpool-yes," replied he. "A short journey like that couldn't fatigue, and might distract her thoughts. Let her go by all means,-it would be the very thing for her." "Oh, sir!" burst out Mary, almost sobbing; "I did so hope you would say she was too ill to go." "Whew-" said he, with a prolonged whistle, trying to understand the case; but, being, as he said, no reader of newspapers, utterly unaware of the peculiar reasons there might be for so apparently unfeeling a wish,-"Why did you not tell me sooner? It might certainly do her harm in her weak state! there is always some risk attending journeys-draughts, and what not. To her they might prove very injurious,-very. I disapprove of journeys or excitement, in all cases where the patient is in the low, fluttered state in which Mrs. Wilson is. If you take my advice, you will certainly put a stop to all thoughts of going to Liverpool." He really had completely changed his opinion, though quite unconsciously; so desirous was he to comply with the wishes of others.

It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which would rank pretty high on the list of numbers I'd least like to be listening to as my eye's gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would be a merciful release.

ეს იყო დღე. ჯერ სხვა - ნამგლებიანი და უროებიანი ქვეყანა ვართ, ქართული ჩაი ჯერ კიდევ სურნელოვანი და საამაყო სასმელია, აფხაზი, ოსი და ქართველი ერთად უხლართავენ სამ გოლს ინგლისელებს, ისინი კიდევ მაინც მღერიან... Liverpool, you will never walk alone... ევროპაში მე ბევრჯერ მინახავს სახიფათოდ ტლუ და მთვრალი ინგლისელი ფანი და დიდი ვერაფერი სანახაობაა, ოღონდ მაშინ თაზოს მამა პირველად ხედავს ცოცხალ ინგლისელებს, რომლებიც უცხო მხარეში თქეშის ქვეშ გაპარტახებულ თავიანთ წითელფორმიან გუნდს კი არ აგინებენ, უმღერიან და შენ მარტო არა ხარ, არასდროს იქნებიო! - ეფერებიან... და ლივერპული დღემდე არ არის მარტო, დღემდე ეგრე მოდიან... სიმღერ-სიმღერით...

My mother was in charge of language. My father had never really learned to read - he could manage slowly, with his fingers on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a doorway. Dad loved Mrs Winterson reading out loud - and I did too. She always stood up while we two sat down, and it was intimate and impressive all at the same time. She read the Bible every night for half an hour, starting at the beginning, and making her way through all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. When she got to her favourite bit, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse, and everyone being exploded and the Devil in the bottomless pit, she gave us all a week off to think about things. Then she started again, Genesis Chapter One. 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...' It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal-minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?

John's was not a glum, negative, insulting attack on society but a sharp-witted, entertaining, cock-a-snook approach that encouraged young people to express themselves as individuals and to reject the stifling rigidity of a lot of the older social traditions. Thanks to John, to give one example, regional dialects were no longer looked upon as a hindrance. He made no attempt to tone down his Liverpool accent (indeed, he exaggerated it) and this encouraged others to follow suit. Previously, without cut-glass Oxford English, it was impossible for anyone to make progress in the media. John changed all that, and a great deal more as well. (Desmond Morris)

That promotion is satisfactory. Yes, Liverpool Football Club are back in the First Division. Back in the Big League. But that is only where Liverpool Football Club belong. Only where they should have been all along. In the First Division, in the Big League. So the next time you come bearing gifts, bringing presents, it will be because we've won the Big League. Because Liverpool Football Club have won the First Division. And the FA Cup. And the European Cup. And every cup there is to win. Because only that will be satisfactory, gentlemen. When Liverpool Football Club have won everything there is to win, when Liverpool Football Club have conquered the world. Only that will be enough.

Room 40 had long followed Kptlt. Walther Schwieger’s U-20 and kept a running record of his patrols: when he left, which route he took, where he was headed, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. In early March 1915, Commander Hope monitored a voyage Schwieger made to the Irish Sea that coincided with a disturbing message broadcast from a German naval transmitter located at Norddeich, on Germany’s North Sea coast just below Holland. Addressed to all German warships and submarines, the message made specific reference to the Lusitania, announcing that the ship was en route to Liverpool and would arrive on March 4 or 5. The meaning was obvious: the German navy considered the Lusitania fair game.

there were solid gold and silver vessels and ornaments, crusted with gems, miles of jewel-sewn brocade, gorgeous pictures and statues that the troops just hacked and smashed, beautiful enamel and porcelain trampled underfoot, weapons and standards set with rubies and emeralds which were gouged and hammered from their settings—all this among the powder-smoke and blood, with native soldiers who’d never seen above ten rupees in their lives, and slum-ruffians from Glasgow and Liverpool, all staggering about drunk on plunder and killing and destruction. One thing I’m sure of: there was twice as much treasure destroyed as carried away, and we officers were too busy bagging our share to do anything about it. I daresay a philosopher would have made heavy speculation about that scene, if he’d had time to spare from filling his pockets. I

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

The CSS Alabama’s captain, Rafael Semmes, was a devout Catholic who saw the Civil War as a religious struggle. He associated Northern Puritanism with narrow-minded bigotry and Catholicism with liberty and virtue. Nine months after Robert E. Lee had finally surrendered to the Union, the Confederate ship Shenandoah dropped anchor in the Mersey, mid-river between the jetties and Laird’s yard. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander James Waddell, lowered the Confederate flag for the last time and handed the vessel over to the Royal Navy on 6 November 1865.

Violent atrocities by teenagers against one another have become the stuff of headlines: at Columbine High School in Colorado; in Tabor, Alberta; in Liverpool, England. But to focus on the grim statistics and media stories of bloody violence is to miss the full impact of children's aggression in our society. The most telling signs of the groundswell of aggression and violence are not in the headlines but in the peer culture — the language, the music, the games, the art, and the entertainment of choice. A culture reflects the dynamics of its participants, and the culture of peer-oriented children is increasingly a culture of aggression and violence. The appetite for violence is reflected in the vicarious enjoyment of it not only in music and movies but in the schoolyards and school halls. Children fuel hostilities among their peers rather than defuse them, encourage others to fight rather than dissuade them from violence. The perpetrators are only the tip of the iceberg. In one schoolyard study, researchers found that most schoolchildren were likely to passively support or actively encourage acts of bullying and aggression; fewer than one in eight attempted to intervene. So ingrained have the culture and psychology of violence become that peers in general expressed more respect and liking for the bullies than for the victims.

Was that not the effect behind my daily reading of the paper? In their businesses and politics, their taverns, movies, assaults, divorces, murders, I tried continually to find clear signs of their common humanity. It was undeniably to, my interest to do this. Because I was involved with them; because, whether I liked it or not, they were my generation, my society, my world. We were figures in the same plot, eternally fixed together. I was aware, also, that their existence, just as it was, made mine possible. And if, as was often said, this part of the century was approaching the nether curve in a cycle, then I, too, would remain on the bottom and there, extinct, merely add my body, my life, to the base of a coming time. This would probably be a condemned age. But... it might be a mistake to think of it in that way. Mists faded and spread and faded on the pane as I breathed. Perhaps a mistake. And when I thought of the condemned ages and those unnamed, lying in their obscurity, I wondered. How did we know how it was? In all principal ways the human spirit must have been the same. Good apparently left fewer traces. And we were coming to know that we had misjudged whole epochs. Besides, the giants of the last century had their Liverpools and Londons, their Lilles and Hamburgs to contend against, as we have our Chicagos and Detroits. And there might be a chance that I was misled, even with these ruins before my eyes, sodden, themselves the color of the fateful paper that I read daily. I have spoken of an "invariable question." But the fact is that it had for many months been not in the least invariable. These were things I would have thought last winter, and now, in their troubled density, they served only to remind me of the sort of person I had been. For a long time "common humanity" and "bring myself to concede" had been completely absent from my mind. And all at once I saw how I had lapsed from that older self to whom they had been so natural.

we neared Liverpool’s Lime Street station, we passed through a culvert with walls that appeared to rise up at least thirty feet, high enough to block out the sun. They were as smooth as Navajo sandstone. This had been bored out in 1836 and had been in continuous use ever since, the conductor told me. “All the more impressive,” he said, “when you consider it was all done by Irish navvies working with wheelbarrows and picks.” I couldn’t place his accent and asked if he himself was Irish, but he gave me a disapproving look and told me he was a native of Liverpool. He had been talking about the ragged class of nineteenth-century laborers, usually illiterate farmhands, known as “navvies”—hard-drinking and risk-taking men who were hired in gangs to smash the right-of-way in a direct line from station to station. Many of them had experienced digging canals and were known by the euphemism “navigators.” They wore the diminutive “navvy” as a term of pride. Polite society shunned them, but these magnificent railways would have been impossible without their contributions of sweat and blood. Their primary task was cleaving the hillsides so that tracks could be laid on a level plain for the weak locomotive engines of the day. Teams of navvies known as “butty gangs” blasted a route with gunpowder and then hauled the dirt out with the same kind of harness that so many children were then using in the coal mines: a man at the back of a full wheelbarrow would buckle a thick belt around his waist, then attach that to a rope dangling from the top of the slope and allow himself to be pulled up by a horse. This was how the Lime Street approach had been dug out, and it was dangerous. One 1827 fatality happened as “the poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body,” as a Liverpool paper told it. The navvies wrecked old England along with themselves, erecting a bizarre new kingdom of tracks. In a passage from his 1848 novel Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens gives a snapshot of the scene outside London: Everywhere