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.