Creative drinks bring out the genius within

Sir Terry Wogan's favourite tipple may not be the stuff of artistic genius.

What does your choice of drink say about you? Sir Terry Wogan's favourite tipple, he confessed this week, is vodka and tonic a revelation that saddened The Daily Telegraph's Michael Deacon. "Vodka and tonic is all right," says Deacon, "but for a man of such wit and singularity, it's a bland choice." If Wogan wants to join the drinking elite, he'll have to be more imaginative.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most creative drinkers are often writers. According to Deacon, Carson McCullers, he of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter fame, worked while sipping a Sonny Boy a concoction made up of hot tea and sherry Evelyn Waugh, on the other hand, favoured a blend of Guinness, ginger beer and gin known as Noonday Reviver; while Anthony Burgess (pictured above - A Clockwork Orange) advocated a cocktail called Hangman's Blood: doubles of gin, whisky, rum, port and brandy, mixed with stout and champagne. ("It induces a somewhat metaphysical elation," Burgess once said.) As for Coleridge, when he wasn't in an opium-induced stupor, he swore by Smoking Bishop, a drink made from port and oranges.

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