The Time quote is sloppy. William McChesney Martin, Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1950s and 1960s, is quoted— in Time— as saying "I’m the fellow who takes away the punch bowl just when the party is getting good." (according to http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/21/take-punch-bowl/ )
Punch, at least the punch one would serve in the U.S. at parties for adults, is often made with bourbon or rum. So according to Martin, the role of the central bank is to restrict the money supply to slow growth just as the economy starts booming (to everyone's annoyance), just as one might take away the alcohol just as a party begins to rock (to everyone's annoyance).
It is not a "general purpose idiom," but the reference is well-understood in financial or economic circles because another chairman, Alan Greenspan, used it in a speech more recently.
Indeed, ever and anon goes back at least as far as Shakespeare, who used it in Henry IV, Part 1. Wikipedia says it "was almost certainly in performance by 1597" and "was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 25 Feb. 1598, and first printed in quarto later that year".
But how much earlier does the phrase go?
Probably not much further, as the earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is also by Shakespeare, in Love's Labour's Lost just a few years earlier:
Euer and anon they made a doubt.
The OED has the first known publishing as 1598 and Wikipedia says it is "believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth".
Often people claim Shakespeare was the coiner of this-or-that many thousand words in the English language, but it's often the case that as a writer of many famous plays, it's more likely his use has survived the ages when someone else may have written it earlier and we've lost their text. People may have already been using them in unrecorded speech for decades. His use is often the most well-known, and dictionary compilers liked to include his quotations in dictionaries.
As a good example, I found an eight-year antedating in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590, Book II) by Sir Philip Sidney:
But euer and anon turning her muzzell toward me, she threwe such a prospect vpon me, as might well haue giuen a surfet to any weake louers stomacke.
Best Answer
It's not a black-and-white difference in meaning, but, from afar usually implies movement (he came from afar), where from far away would describe an action taken while staying far away (we heard his voice from far away).
Hopefully someone can remind me if there is a grammaticistal term or explanation, all I can think of is … context? connotation?