My job requires me to travel anywhere in Britain and in the last three years it’s taken me to places I’d never visited before, such as Southampton. Southampton, like my home city of Liverpool, built its wealth from its port. I was anticipating a grand waterfront, not necessarily buildings as iconic as the Liver Building … More English Journey by J B Priestley
My father was a Barnardo’s boy. In 1926, aged seven, he was put into the Liverpool Home for Destitute Children and Orphans because his war-widow mother, Agnes, was too poor to keep him. I’d grown up knowing he was brought up in an “orphanage” but took it as read that both his parents were dead. … More Twopence to Cross the Mersey by Helen Forrester
One summer holiday, as a ‘project’, I decided to research my family. Not my family tree, you understand, but my family. I was ten, I think; eleven at most. I devised a list of fifteen questions and then interviewed all my immediate family members, parents, brother, sister, cousin, aunts, uncle, granddad. (As children go I … More Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: The Merchant of Venice, Act 4 Scene 1 At the time of writing I’m not long back from Stratford-upon-Avon and a … More The Quality of Mercy by Barry Unsworth
Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010) hailed from the same city as me, Liverpool. I didn’t know that until I read John Banville’s introduction to my edition of Master Georgie. And nor did my hubby, also from Liverpool. So it’s fair to say that Bainbridge isn’t feted as much in her home city as other Scouse writers such … More Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge
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