Murray, N: So Spirited a Town

In this highly personal encounter with his native city Nicholas Murray blends literary descriptions of Liverpool across the centuries with his own memories of a 1960s Liverpool childhood to create an original and nuanced portrait of the character of a remarkable city. The result is a rich mosaic built up from a range of literary sources: quirky eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guide books, songs, poems, reminiscences, sermons, novels, letters, histories, travelogues, political tracts, autobiographies, essays, journalism, official reports, and jokes. This is a book about how Liverpool has been seen by others but it is also a personal and sometimes moving record of growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, exploring in an often light-hearted way what it means to be 'Scouse', never forgetting that De Quincey's "many-languaged town" is a cosmopolitan, multi-racial seaport with an often tough history of poverty, industrial strife, migration, but, above all, humour.

Preface 1. The Strange Dream of Doctor Jung 2. The Boy in the Playground 3. The Meaning of Scouse 4. Through Other Eyes 5. The Africa Trade 6. Christian Politeness 7. The Bootle Cow 8. The Wild Irish 9. Court Life 10. The Sea Bathing Lake 11. A Statue Exceedingly Bare 12. Of All Places the Most Museless 13. White Lace on Dark Waters 14. The Infantry Officer 15. Faces Without Laughter Coda Bibliography