Join Colonel Chris Hadfield – acclaimed astronaut, test pilot, spacewalker, spaceship commander, and best-selling author – for a captivating journey into the majesty of our planet and the vast universe beyond. In this visually stunning event, Chris will present never-before-seen space imagery of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and more, in an awe-inspiring exploration of discovery.
Age Guidance: 12+
Buckle up and fasten your seatbelts for a hugely entertaining all-areas-access conversation spanning a decade inside Formula 1, with former Haas F1 team principal Guenther Steiner, star of Netflix’s smash hit docuseries Drive to Survive.
Uncompromising, brutally funny and searingly honest, this is Guenther at his very best, telling his story as only he can. Not an event any fan of Formula 1 can afford to miss.
Waterstones Liverpool welcomes Jonn Elledge who joins us to discuss A History of the World in 47 Borders – The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps. Eye-opening and entertaining in equal measure, Elledge’s geo-political history of the world is filled with fascinating narratives about our ever-abiding pre-occupation with drawing lines and upholding ideas of nationhood.
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about the scale of human folly.
From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.
John will be in conversation with Neil Atkinson. The discussion wil be followed by an audeince Q&A and then a book signing.
Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard and a number of other newspapers. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, spending six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He lives in London.
Neil Atkinson is a broadcaster and author and is one of the hosts and founding members of The Anfield Wrap.
Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell is a rare opportunity to hear the story of how one of the UK’s most successful artist managers came to work with Oasis, the definitive act of Britpop.
Along with the Department of Music’s Dr Mike Jones, a lifelong friend, Russell will reflect on memories of his formative music industry experiences as a young gig promoter in his hometown of Ebbw Vale in South Wales, eventually leading to his management of Jones’s band Latin Quarter, which became a springboard to a 40-year career.
Promoted by the Department of Music, University of Liverpool through the generous support of Mark Astaire, in memory of his brother, Peter Astaire.
Join the Institute of Irish Studies for a talk by Dylan Thomas expert Professor John Goodby (Professor of Arts and Culture, Sheffield Hallam University) and excerpts from Stan Tracey’s Jazz Suite Inspired by Under Milk Wood by pianist Richard Wetherall with narration by Seamus Lavan. The evening will conclude with a wine reception, during which John Goodby will sign copies of his co-authored biography Dylan Thomas (Critical Lives).
‘Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice’: Dylan Thomas and Irish writers
In a review of 1934, the youthful Dylan Thomas claimed: ‘The true future of English poetry, poetry that that can be … read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries. … Wales [and] Ireland … are building up a poetry that is as serious and genuine as the poetry in Mr Pound’s Active Anthology’.
Like the work of the Irish writers he admired – he thought W. B. Yeats ‘the greatest modern poet’, while James Joyce was the single biggest influence on his style – Thomas exemplifies the way in which writers of the 1920s and 1930s from the so-called margins wrote back to the centre, deploying modernist experiment, linguistic excess, parody, and surrealism to undermine metropolitan pretensions to authority.
Married to Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of Yeats’s friend, the minor poet Francis Macnamara, Thomas also enjoyed many material and familial contact with Ireland, which he visited in 1935 and 1946, while traces of his literary influence and personality can be found in the work of poets as varied as Medbh McGuckian and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the ‘Belfast Group’ of the 1960s – Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.
This talk will address this little-known web of influence and impact, with a primary focus on Thomas’s debt to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a title he mischievously purloined for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as well as the Yeatsian models for his early short stories and poems such as ‘In my craft and sullen art’. It will also touch on the apparently stark differences between his famous radio work, Under Milk Wood, and those by Samuel Beckett, such as All That Fall.
John Goodby is Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. His research specialisms are Irish writing, Welsh poetry, and British / US poetry, especially modernist poetry, more broadly. He is the leading authority on the work of Dylan Thomas and the author / editor of five books on the subject, including Collected Poems (2014). In this capacity he has worked with and as a consultant to the BBC, the Arts Council, the National Trust, Aardman Films, the OU, the British Library, British Council, etc. He is also a poet and translator of poetry (to date, from Italian, French, and German), with a strong interest in non-anglophone poetries. He has an interest in the visual arts and modern art music, and this is reflected in several collaborations with composers and artists. As an active arts organiser, he has organised poetry festivals, edited poetry anthologies and magazines, run a poetry press, and curated and presented poetry reading series.
Richard Wetherall has been working as a pianist for 25 years in which time he has played with jazz musicians Richard Iles, Bobby Wellins and Mark Nightingale. He has toured worldwide with Casablanca Steps and Dominic Halpin and the Honey B’s including supporting Tony Bennett and his quartet in Halifax, Canada. He has taught in various institutions including LIPA, Manchester University and Chetham’s Piano Summer School. He accompanies two Music Place choirs as well as the Vibrant Voices Choir (for people living with dementia).
Seamus Lavan is an actor and theatre-maker. He graduated from Oxford University in 2017, where he studied English. He then trained for two years at the Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
He has performed on both screen and stage in projects that include short films, fashion campaigns, music videos, and an outdoor production of Henry V in Florence scored by a full, live orchestra.
After graduating from Lecoq, he started a theatre company called BRILLIG with some of his classmates. They recently finished devising their first show, Terry’s – a cabaret set in a 1990s US car dealership. They will take this to the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringes later this year, before doing a national tour.
He is also developing a solo piece based on Julius Caesar’s long-lost TED talk on leadership mindset. This should be finished in the autumn.
This reading and discussion group will focus on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban-en-Banlieue.
Wed 7 May, 5.30-7.30pm
Led by poet Jennifer Lee Tsai, currently an Artist in Residence at Bluecoat through the Wittenham Bursary, you will read and share thoughts, ideas, and reflections on this powerful and innovative work in an inclusive, friendly, and encouraging space. All are welcome.
Free, booking essential
Join us for an captivating evening with renowned artist Luke Jerram as he shares insights into his work, including the creation of Helios, the breathtaking installation illuminating Liverpool Cathedral.
Following the talk, the artist will be signing copies of his new book, available for purchase in the Cathedral Shop.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from one of the UK’s renowned artists and take home a signed copy of his new publication!
Jay Rayner is going back on the road!
Join the ever-tasteful, often hilarious, always readable writer and broadcaster as he celebrates 25 years as The Observer’s award-winning restaurant critic with the publication of Nights Out At Home, a memoir-in-recipes. Throughout his quarter of a century eating professionally in some of the world’s best (and frankly worst) restaurants, Jay has always reverse-engineered his favourite dishes; now he’s ready to share with you those brilliant recipes and his memories of the restaurants that served them.
In this joyfully greedy show, Jay answers the questions we’ve always wanted answered, put to him by a host of virtual star interviewers: what expertise does a restaurant critic need? What’s the best way to roast a chicken? Is he just an utterable snob? And if he’s so bloody clever, why doesn’t he just open his own damn restaurant? And you’ll get to ask your questions too.
Nights Out At Home is an uproarious, insightful, and butter-smeared journey through the life of a man with one of the most coveted jobs in the world.
Kerry Ellis is the Queen of the West End. From My Fair Lady to We Will Rock You, from Les Miserables to Wicked, in both the West End and on Broadway, she has starred in musical theatre’s biggest roles, making shows her own and earning her numerous awards. Her list of credits is remarkable and also includes Oliver!, Cats, Miss Saigon, Chess, The War Of The Worlds, and Anything Goes, among many others.
She has recorded 4 studio albums, and toured the world both as a solo artist and with her good friend Sir Brian May. And now the star who grew up admiring musical theatre icons Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand is looking back on her illustrious career.
Singing songs from the biggest musicals and telling stories about how she came to play roles, this is a unique opportunity to see and hear the West End’s biggest hits in a very intimate setting on a tour of the UK. Don’t miss it.
A talk by Piers Secunda (A U.K. Government Enquiry was announced after his 2023 exhibition closed).
In the last couple of years the UK media has frequently published revelations and new information about the German occupation of the British Channel Island of Alderney. A large volume of this new information has been found by British artist Piers Secunda. His findings expose some shocking truths about the the nature of the occuation of Alderney and the UK’s failure to prosecute the war crimes carried out there by the SS, against prisoners from 20 different nations across Europe and North Africa.
This promises to be an edge of your seat talk, laying bare many of Piers’ findings, some of which pushed the UK Government to open an inquiry into how many people died on Alderney during the war.