display:inline; does the trick, now to get calibre to recognise the paragraphs.
and to be clear, its the line breaks I'm trying to remove. I have a lot of LIT files from work that are quite old and have pages set out thus;
<p>hello I'm a piece of text blah blah blah blah</p>
<p> and I'm the second line of the original text</p>]
Which displays on my 505 as
hello I'm a piece of text blah blah
blah blag
and I'm the second line of the original
text
etc etc etc etc etc
UGLY.