Description: Calculating liquid energy and heat capacity in general form is an open problem in condensed matter physics. We develop a recent approach to liquids from the solid state by accounting for the contribution of anharmonicity and thermal expansion to liquid energy and heat capacity. We subsequently compare theoretical predictions to the experiments results of 5 commonly discussed liquids, and find a good agreement with no free fitting parameters. We discuss and compare the proposed theory to previous approaches. *** Journal reference: Physical Review B 84, 054106 (2011), http://prb.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v84/i5/e054106 ***