This chapter considers the forms of poetic compression, and covers some of the more extreme forms of poetic expression. There is an extreme form of compression which we might call 'micro-poetry', where the page contains a single word, or a modified form of a word, or a fragment of a word, or even just a gesture that draws attention to the absence of words. The chapter looks at the roots of minimalism, which is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon in poetry. The literary figure whose philosophy and rhetoric were most similar to that of Adolf Loos was the American poet Ezra Pound, who was living in London just before the First World War, and was keen to make a radical break with the literary past.

The introduction shows why Burley is so important among manuscript miscellanies, having over 200 verse entries, about three-quarters of them in English, and the English ones spread among many authors (including Donne, Spenser and Jonson), with more than a quarter being anonymous. The English verse is then divided into genres (lyric, satire, epigram, elegy, verse-letter and so on) and extensive commentary and notes, including reasons for authorial attributions, are provided.

While the public health lobby became more influential in the 1970s and 1980s, it struggled to have an impact on policy. The political mood, which had swung towards the liberalisation of the drinks trade in the early 1960s, did not change under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration. If anything, it became more firmly established. This is not to say that there were no concerns over drink and drunkenness. In 1989, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission published a report on the supply of beer which looked specifically at the question of tied houses. The report formed the basis of the Supply of Beer (Tied Estate) Order — otherwise known as the ‘Beer Orders’. The historic tie between brewers and retailers collapsed following the Beer Orders; the principle of ‘need’ collapsed under pressure from both central government and the magistrates' own advisory bodies. For the first time, the alcohol industry began to market drunkenness as a primary aim of drinking as they sought to compete with other psychoactive youth markets.

The period between 1870 and 1918 witnessed intense intellectual and political activity around alcohol addiction. Many writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the drink question as a straight conflict between defining habitual drunkenness as vice or disease. In truth, however, it could never be fully accounted for as either. The late nineteenth century certainly witnessed a marked increase in the use, and influence, of disease-based models of alcohol addiction. The disease model of alcohol addiction first entered the public domain in Britain through the introduction of legislation which allowed for the creation of quasi-penal institutions to which ‘habitual drunkards’ could be committed for periods of restraint and rehabilitation. The Liberal MP for Bath, Donald Dalrymple, campaigned for the creation of asylums for the treatment of habitual drunkards, leading to the eventual passing of the Habitual Drunkards Act in 1879. This chapter discusses inebriety, medicine and law, retreat and rehabilitation of habitual drunkards, the inebriate asylum movement, differences between inebriety and dipsomania, drink and criminal liability, inebriety and degeneration, and the decline of medical temperance.

This chapter introduces Iain Sinclair, who is a good example of the figure of the visionary outsider, and the author of known works such as Edge of the Orison and Lud Heat. It first presents a general description of Sinclair and his works, and then turns to his change of focus that corresponds to what has been called as the ‘spatial turn’ in social and critical theory. It shows that walking is Sinclair's practice of studying the spatial configurations modern life. Here, the chapter focuses on flâneur and the practice of ‘tactical’ walking.