A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container with a bulging center, longer than it is wide. They are traditionally bound by wood or metal hoops. Modern wooden barrels for wine-making are made of French common oak or white oak or from American white oak and have standard sizes: "Bordeaux type" 225 litres, "Burgundy type" 228 litres and "Cognac type" 300 litres. Modern barrels and casks can be made of aluminum, stainless steel, different types of plastic, such as HDPE. Someone who makes barrels is called cooper. Barrels are only one product of cooperage. Coopers make buckets, tubs, butter churns, firkins, kilderkins, rundlets, pipes, butts, pins and breakers. Barrels have a variety of uses, including storage of liquids such as water, oil and sake, they are employed to hold maturing beverages such as wine, armagnac, port and beer. Other commodities once stored in wooden casks include gunpowder, fish, honey and tallow. Early casks were bound with wooden hoops and in the 19th century these were replaced by metal hoops that were stronger, more durable and took up less space.

The term barrel can refer to cylindrical containers or drums made of modern materials like plastic, steel or aluminium. The barrel has been used as a standard size of measure referring to a set capacity or weight of a given commodity. For example, in the UK a barrel of beer refers to a quantity of 36 imperial gallons. Wine was shipped in barrels of 119 litres. A barrel of oil, defined as 42 US gallons, is still used as a measure of volume for oil, although oil is no longer shipped in barrels; the barrel has come into use as a generic term for a wooden cask of any size. An Egyptian wall-painting in the tomb of Hesy-Ra, dating to 2600 BC, shows a wooden tub made of staves, bound together with wooden hoops, used to measure corn. Another Egyptian tomb painting dating to 1900 BC shows a cooper and tubs made of staves in use at the grape harvest. Palm-wood casks were reported in use in ancient Babylon. In Europe and casks dating to 200 BC have been found preserved in the mud of lake villages. A lake village near Glastonbury dating to the late Iron Age has yielded one complete tub and a number of wooden staves.

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder reports that cooperage in Europe originated with the Gauls in Alpine villages where they stored their beverages in wooden casks bound with hoops. Pliny identified three different types of coopers: ordinary coopers, wine coopers and coopers who made large casks. Large casks are correspondingly more difficulty to assemble. Roman coopers tended passing their skills on to their sons; the Greek geographer Strabo records wooden pithoi were lined with pitch to stop leakage and preserve the wine. Barrels were sometimes used for military purposes. Julius Caesar used catapults to hurl burning barrels of tar into towns under siege to start fires; the Romans used empty barrels to make pontoon bridges to cross rivers. Empty casks were used to line the walls of shallow wells from at least Roman times; such casks were found in 1897 during archaeological excavation in Britain of Roman Silchester. They were made of Pyrenean silver fir and the staves were one and a half inches thick and featured grooves where the heads fitted.

They had Roman numerals scratched on the surface of each stave to help with reassembly. In Anglo-Saxon Britain wooden barrels were used to store ale, butter and mead. Drinking containers were made from small staves of oak, yew or pine; these items required considerable craftsmanship to hold liquids and might be bound with finely worked precious metals. They were valued items and were sometimes buried with the dead as grave goods. Churns and tubs made from staves have been excavated from peat bogs and lake villages in Europe. A large keg and a bucket were found in the Viking Gokstad ship excavated near Oslo Fiord in 1880. An "aging barrel" is used to age wine; when a wine or spirit ages in a barrel, small amounts of oxygen are introduced as the barrel lets some air in. Oxygen enters a barrel when water or alcohol is lost due to evaporation, a portion known as the "angels' share". In an environment with 100% relative humidity little water evaporates and so most of the loss is alcohol, a useful trick if one has a wine with high proof.

Most beverages are topped up from other barrels to prevent significant oxidation, although others such as vin jaune and sherry are not. Beverages aged in wooden barrels take on some of the compounds in the barrel, such as vanillin and wood tannins; the presence of these compounds depends on many factors, including the place of origin, how the staves were cut and dried, the degree of "toast" applied during manufacture. Barrels used for aging are made of French or American oak, but chestnut and redwood are used; some Asian beverages use Japanese cedar, which imparts an minty-piney flavor. In Peru and Chile, a grape distillate named pisco is either aged in earthenware; some wines are fermented "on barrel", as opposed to in a neutral container like steel or wine-grade HDPE tanks. Wine can be fermented in large wooden tanks, which—when open to the atmosphere

BBC Radio Merseyside is the BBC Local Radio service for the Merseyside region, England. It was the third BBC local radio station to start broadcasting, launching on 22 November 1967, serving south west Lancashire. According to RAJAR, the station has a weekly audience of 288,000 listeners and a 10.4% share as of December 2018. BBC Radio Merseyside broadcasts from its studios in Hanover St, Liverpool on 95.8 MHz, 1485 kHz and DAB. The Allerton Park transmitter transmits Radio City on 96.7 MHz. Both have the same coverage. DAB signals come from the EMAP Digital EMAP Liverpool 11B multiplex] from Billinge Hill, Hope Mountain and Radio City Tower. In late 1981 BBC Radio Merseyside moved from the council-owned offices in Commerce House, Liverpool to a new purpose built studios on Paradise Street, Liverpool. Broadcasts began from the new studios on 7 December 1981, 14 years after the station's inception. On 15 July 2006, BBC Radio Merseyside moved from its former home to a new purpose-built studio building on the corner of Hanover Street and College Lane in Liverpool.

This building has three ground-floor studios next to a public performance space. An open learning centre is on the first floor and the main office is on the second floor. It's the third building Radio Merseyside has occupied since it was launched in 1967 from studios on the sixth floor of a council-owned building, Commerce House, in Sir Thomas Street. In October 2006, the studio building was nominated and made the Building Design shortlist for the inaugural Carbuncle Cup, awarded to Drake Circus Shopping Centre in Plymouth. Most of BBC Radio Merseyside's programming is produced and broadcast from its Liverpool studios from 5am - 1am on weekdays, 6am - 12am on Saturdays and 5am - 2am on Sundays. During the station's downtime, BBC Radio Merseyside simulcasts BBC Radio 5 Live overnight. Specialist programming includes Liverpool's only English-Chinese speaking programming Orient Express with June Yee and Billy Hui and Upfront with Ngunan Adamu. During a breakfast show on 25 June 2007, presenter Simon O'Brien accidentally broadcast an unedited interview in which he said, "fuck the government, fuck the planners".

O'Brien resigned from the station in the day. He went on to present a short-lived Saturday breakfast show on talk radio station City Talk 105.9 in Liverpool. City Talk used the now infamous phrase that led to his resignation as part of their launch marketing for the station. BBC Radio Merseyside North West Radio History of local radio in Merseyside MDS975's Transmitter map. Allerton transmitter 95.8 MHz Hope Mountain Wallasey transmitter 1485 KHz Mediumwave

Jacques Amyot, French Renaissance writer and translator, was born of poor parents, at Melun. Amyot found his way to the University of Paris, where he supported himself by serving some of the richer students, he was nineteen when he became M. A. at Paris, he graduated doctor of civil law at Bourges. Through Jacques Colure, abbot of St. Ambrose in Bourges, he obtained a tutorship in the family of a secretary of state. By the secretary he was recommended to Margaret of France, Duchess of Berry, through her influence was made professor of Greek and Latin at Bourges. Here he translated the Æthiopica of Heliodorus, for which he was rewarded by Francis I with the abbey of Bellozane, he was thus enabled to go to Italy to study the Vatican text of Plutarch, on the translation of whose Lives he had been some time engaged. On the way he turned aside on a mission to the Council of Trent. Returning home, he was appointed tutor to the sons of Henry II, by one of whom he was afterwards made grand almoner and by the other was appointed, in spite of his plebeian origin, commander of the Order of the Holy Spirit.

Pius V promoted him to the bishopric of Auxerre in 1570, here he continued to live in comparative quiet, repairing his cathedral and perfecting his translations, for the rest of his days, though troubled towards the close by the insubordination and revolts of his clergy. He was a devout and conscientious churchman, had the courage to stand by his principles, it is said that he advised the chaplain of Henry III to refuse absolution to the king after the murder of the Guise princes. He was suspected of approving the crime, his house was plundered, he was compelled to leave Auxerre for some time. He died bequeathing, it is said, 1200 crowns to the hospital at Orléans for the twelve deniers he received there when "poor and naked" on his way to Paris, he translated seven books of Diodorus Siculus, the Daphnis et Chloë of Longus and the Opera Moralia of Plutarch. His vigorous and idiomatic version of Plutarch, Vies des hommes illustres, was translated into English by Sir Thomas North, supplied Shakespeare with materials for his Roman plays.

Montaigne said of him, "I give the palm to Jacques Amyot over all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his language in which he surpasses all others, nor for his constancy to so long an undertaking, nor for his profound learning... but I am grateful to him for his wisdom in choosing so valuable a work."It was indeed to Plutarch that Amyot devoted his attention. His other translations were subsidiary; the version of Diodorus he did not publish. Amyot took great pains to find and interpret the best authorities, but the interest of his books today lies in the style, his translation reads like an original work. The personal method of Plutarch appealed to a generation addicted to memoirs and incapable of any general theory of history. Amyot's book, obtained an immense popularity, exercised great influence over successive generations of French writers. Works by or about Jacques Amyot at Internet Archive