Anybody know a trick. Display:block will not work as that clears both sides and there is content to the left

not sure what you're trying to achieve?

Getting and inline element to clear right

Guess you don't mean: selector { clear:right; } ?

Got an example ?

I messed around with this for a while, and I'm assuming the issue is your span/em/whatever is INSIDE a tag, right? The closest I was able to get was giving your tag a padding-right. The issue is that if you have a padding that extends beyond your parent's width it puts the whole element on its own line.

I even tried using the pseudo-element :after to produce a line-feed but that didn't work either.