The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking - Tapa blanda

Alcohol is mankind's favourite drug. Tipple, red-eye, poison, mother's ruin, mud in your eye, juice, sauce, a shot of the hard stuff and plonk - all of these terms are included in this anthology of nips and draughts of every intoxicant in the thesaurus - and then some more - with swigs and gulps from Rabelais, Homer, the Bible, Chaucer, Dickens, Kingsley Amis, Gavin Ewart, Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney.

Simon Rae's award-winning W. G. Grace: A Life received widespread acclaim on its publication in 1998. He has also edited a number of anthologies, and for five years presented BBC Radio 4's 'Poetry Please!'. For nearly ten years he wrote regular topical poems for the Guardian and published two collections of them, Soft Targets and Rapid Response. He collaborated with Ronald Searle on a book of cartoons and poems, The Face of War, and in 1999 he won the National Poetry Prize. His first stage play, A Quiet Night In, was produced in Bristol and London the same year. In 1999/2000 he was poet in residence with Warwickshire County Cricket Club and MAC at Edgbaston, and he was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Warwick University for 2000/2001.