On September 11, 1660, Samuel Pepys tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: ‘And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee ( a China drink), of which I never had drank before.’ Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn’t say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone’s drinking a cup of tea. A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India, quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do, because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them – so it was thought – because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant passages in six volumes of dense and secret scribblings, not to mention what gave him the inspiration to look there in the first place, are mysteries that are some distance beyond being answerable.”