Short answers, pulled from the story.
The name Liège is of Germanic origin, reconstructible as liudik-, from the Germanic word liudiz meaning "people." Related forms appear in Dutch, German, Polish, Czech, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Russian. The city was first recorded in 558 under the Latin form Vicus Leudicus.
La cité ardente means "the fervent city" in French. The epithet emerged around 1905 and originally referred to Liège's history of rebellions against Burgundian rule. It was later applied to describe the city's economic energy during the Industrial Revolution.
After the citizens of Liège defeated Prince-Bishop Engelbert III de la Marck in battle in 1345, the city's 32 guilds took sole political control of municipal government. Every person on a guild's register could participate, and each guild held an equal voice. It was considered the most democratic political system the Low Countries had ever known, and the model spread to Utrecht.
A chain of twelve forts built around Liège in the 1880s under Henri Alexis Brialmont forced the German First Army, numbering roughly 100,000 men, to lay siege rather than advance freely. General Gérard Leman's 30,000 defenders held for twelve days before a bombardment using thirty-two 21 cm mortars and two 42 cm Big Bertha howitzers forced surrender. The twelve-day delay contributed to the eventual failure of the German invasion of France.
Liège is the only city that has hosted stages of all three cycling Grand Tours: the Giro d'Italia in 1973 and 2006, the Tour de France in 2004, 2012, and 2017, and the Vuelta a España in 2009. It is also home to Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the oldest of the five monuments of cycling.
The Bosman ruling arose from R.F.C. de Liège's refusal to release player Jean-Marc Bosman. The resulting legal case produced a landmark ruling that transformed the transfer system in European football, giving players significantly greater freedom of movement.