The centenary of the Faculty of Arts in the University of Liverpool is celebrated in December 1996. We may recall what we are celebrating. Since the structural pattern of other comparable universities is broadly similar to our own, it is easy to think that there was some inevitability about the Faculty of Arts's existence and early development. This is not so. A picture of early Faculty members - which has been housed in various places in the past and is now splendidly sited on the stairway of the Sydney Jones Library - gives us a clue to why things turned out as they did and will give me a thread to hold together my own version, incomplete and partial as it must be, of the one hundred years now being celebrated.

In the centre of Albert Lipczinski's composition, standing with his right had raised, is the commanding figure of the Rathbone Professor of History, John Macdonald Mackay. He was by all accounts a man of ‘compelling personality’, and the picture gives us some sense of this. The picture was begun in 1914 and completed in 1917. It shows us Mackay addressing a group of influential academics consisting of the Professors of Russian, Spanish, English Language and Philology, English Literature, Architecture, Egyptology, and Classical Archaeology, together with the Secretary of the University Extension Board and the University Librarian. These had met as a discussion group for some years and were acknowledged as a driving force in the University under the name of the ‘New Testament’.