I had been puzzling over getting the paginate links to look like my designers code, and when I looked in the source I found there were vars waiting for my changes
I needed to add li /li round each page link to get the css to work, so I just changed the vars here rather than hack the code—- thanks EE team 
search for something here:
http://www.cactuslanguagetraining.com/en/
to see how it looked.
core/core.paginate.php
class Paginate {
var $base_url = ''; // The page we are linking to (when using this class in the CP)
var $path = ''; // The page we are linking to (when using this class in a public page)
var $prefix = ''; // A custom prefix added to the path.
var $suffix = ''; // A custom suffix added to the path.
var $qstr_var = ''; // The name of the query string variable containing current page number
var $cur_page = ''; // The current page being viewed
var $total_count = ''; // Total number of items (database results)
var $per_page = ''; // Max number of items you want shown per page
var $max_links = 2; // Number of "digit" links to show before/after the currently viewed page
var $first_page = '';
var $last_page = '';
var $next_link = 'NEXT';
var $prev_link = 'PREVIOUS';
var $first_marker = '«';
var $last_marker = '»';
var $first_url = ''; // Alternative URL for the First Page.
var $first_div_o = '<li>';
var $first_div_c = '</li>';
var $next_div_o = '<li>';
var $next_div_c = '</li>';
var $prev_div_o = '<li>';
var $prev_div_c = '</li>';
var $num_div_o = '<li>';
var $num_div_c = '</li>';
var $cur_div_o = '<li class="selected">';
var $cur_div_c = '</li>';
var $last_div_o = '<li>';
var $last_div_c = '</li>';
