title: Shakespeare's Pub: A Barstool History of London as Seen Through the Windows of Its Oldest Pub - The George Inn
author:  Pete Brown 
description: *Starred Review* Browns fourth book on the world of beer is a history of innkeeping in England, because inns found it essential to brew. At the center of the centuries-long story is Londons oldest inn, the George, just a hop-skip south of London Bridge in Southwark. The Georges heritage is traceable from Chaucers day, though the Canterbury pilgrims embarked from the Tabard next door, and it figures in Dickens The Pickwick Papers. Whether Shakespeare patronized the George cant be nailed down, but Southwark was Londons theater district, so why not assume? The connections of inns and literature form one strand of Browns exposition throughout, with wagoning (i.e., hauling goods), quartering both long-term and overnight, victualing, and conventioneering (local councils, clubs, political factions) constituting others. Less enduring but of immense importance is the great age of coaching, from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, during which inns flourished as never before or since. As befits his convivial subject, Brown writes as a spellbinding raconteur, keeping to each chapters topic while taking off on tangents that never prove irrelevant and joking to beat the band but never trying our patience. A book to be read and reread, straight through or piecemeal, chuckling and, ideally, sipping a pint all the while. --Ray Olson
zlib_text: Silence Please
  
  Arthur C. Clarke
  
  1954 Popular Publications Inc.
  
    
    
    
    
  
  You come upon the "White Hart" quite unexpectedly in one of these anonymous
  little lanes leading down from Fleet Street to the Embankment. It's no use
  telling you where it is: very few people who have set out in a determined
  effort to get there have ever actually arrived. For the first dozen visits a
  guide is essential: after that you'll probably be all right if you close your
  eyes and rely on instinct. Also-to be perfectly frank-we don't want any more
  customers, at least on our night. The place is already uncomfortably crowded.
  All that I'll say about its location is that it shakes occasionally with the
  vibration of newspaper presses, and that if you crane out of the window of the
  gents' room you can just see the Thames.
  
  From the outside, it looks like any other pub-as indeed it is for five days of
  the week. The public and saloon bars are on the ground floor: there are the
  usual vistas of brown oak panelin