Mr Mannion says he will sell no more draught beer until the gap narrows.The row over the pub tie is a bare-knuckled brawl, which pits disaffected publicans, campaigners and politicians against "pubcos" such as Enterprise and Punch Taverns, which own 22,800 of Britain's 50,000 pubs.
One observer remarked in 1523 that better sermons could be heard in the inns of Ulm than in its churches, and in Basel in 1524 there were complaints about people preaching from books and pamphlets in the town's taverns.
Mr Gatrell does a fine job of tracing how the scurrilous behaviour of London's residents often inspired some of the finest works of art and literature.He evokes a Covent Garden of coffee houses, tenements, artist studios, taverns and brothels.
Before long he had lost his virginity in a Havana brothel and had plunged deep into the reeking taverns and alleyways of port life a life that was to go on resurfacing, in bold, tortured figurative painting, for the rest of his career.He was restless always.
FLAMENCO evokes stereotypical visions of gypsy women in ruffled skirts pounding their feet in the taverns of Andalusia.
The better the service, the bigger the tip.Such explanations no doubt explain the purported origin of tipping in the 16th century, boxes in English taverns carried the phrase "To Insure Promptitude" (later just "TIP").
Britain's first licensing act, passed in 1552, made an early distinction between rich and poor boozers by enforcing strictures on "common alehouses" which did not apply to wine taverns.
Scale is needed to defray the distribution costs: a brewer has to be able to deliver a low-value but bulky product twice a week to remote taverns.
Nobody really knows what the original 18th-century bourbon tasted like; but it seems likely that the frontier drink dubbed "red-eye" by early settlers and cowboys was a lot cruder than anything on the market today, certainly too fierce for William Faulkner, and probably also for those blue-collar tipplers in their rustbelt taverns.
What inducements, personal or political, they may have received for this, is a subject of great speculation in the taverns of Prague.So will Mr Topolanek's government be any good?
