‘No Arts; No Letters; No Society; and which is worst of all, ... the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). The University of Liverpool pioneered the system, now general among British universities, whereby departments of related disciplines are grouped into ‘Faculties’ with administrative and academic responsibilities and powers. The first Faculty at Liverpool with these commitments was the Arts Faculty, whose initial meeting was held in December 1896. Commemoration of the centenary of the Arts Faculty was marked by the publication of this volume. The book contains reminiscences by former students relating to each decade of the century, and also the reminiscences of a number of former Deans. Essays ‘informative and critical’ have been contributed by recent and present members of staff. They include an account of the buildings occupied by – and in some instances designed for – the Faculty of Arts; a 1950s dialogue by the late Kenneth Muir, the distinguished Shakespeare scholar; and a study of J. M. Mackay, the Highlander who in the 1890s was the prime advocate of a Faculty system. The volume concludes with an essay by Professor Stephen R. L. Clark analysing the position of Arts today and pointing to the future.

This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787, which was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa which underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the settlers themselves, London's 'Black Poor'. The relevance of the expedition to contemporary race relations in Britain is considered. Once in West Africa, the settlers faced a struggle to survive against often harsh conditions, a struggle which included conflict with slave traders and local Africans. It is suggested that the final,albeit limited, success of the settlement helped to mould British policy towards Black Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Between 1739 and 1742, Britain’s major war effort against Spain was concentrated in the Caribbean. This book sets out to examine the problems involved in operating and administering the overseas naval bases at the heart of this effort. Drawing largely on unpublished archive material, it paints a detailed picture of the organisation and development of the yard facilities at Jamaica and English Harbour, as well as examining the problems of manning and supplying the ships stationed there. Making extensive use of ships’ muster books, the author provides for the first time a quantitative assessment of the problems of sickness and desertion facing the commanders in the West Indies. The title of this book is taken from the two most common diseases suffered by the men stationed in the Caribbean.

In 1889, Liverpool's first Professor of Physics, Oliver Lodge, was invited to form a society for the cultivation of physics in the city. Lodge is commonly regarded as a conservative in comparison with many of the physicists of his time, a time when the most fundamental theories and discoveries about the nature of space, matter and time were being made. However, this book argues that this view needs to be modified. It advances the idea that Lodge's theory of ‘ether’, his attempt to provide a unified explanation for the nuclear physics, has been somewhat revived by recent work in quantum electro-dynamics. However, the book stresses that no assessment of Lodge's can be complete without considering his influence as an educator and expounder of complex ideas of which he had a remarkable grasp which he could communicate with great lucidity.