Liverpool has been a blighted hulk for a long time. Now it’s been named the European Capital of Culture, and maybe that will help pick up the city and return it to its former glory. “A hundred years ago the city was the gateway to the empire, the port from which nine million emigrants sailed off to the promised lands of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” It was then “Britain’s only really multicultural city which teemed with Lascar seamen from the Indies, the descendants of African and Black American sailors, Jews from the Pale of Settlement, and the largest Chinatown in Europe. It was a city with its back turned against the land, one which barely inhabited the country it was nominally part of.”