Through the Looking Glass

Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Six years later, he published its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Not many people (eg me until today) know that the only time Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) went abroad was on a two-month trip to Russia July-Sept 1867. The journal Carroll/Dodgson wrote recording his experiences in Russia was only published in 1935. I have ordered a copy from Amazon, and will let you know what he did there. Lewis Carroll was born in Daresbury, Cheshire (1832). He was gifted at mathematics, went to Oxford, graduated with first class honours, and stayed at his college, Christ Church, as a teacher for the rest of his life. Uniquely, for a university tutor at the time, he was excused ordination. He didn't really like teaching. But it earned him a living, and he thought of it as a temporary endeavour while he worked on becoming famous as an artist. Carroll wrote poems and short stories, and took photographs, and then one day in 1856, he took three little girls, Ina, Edith, and Alice on a boating trip down the river, and told them the story that became Alice.

Talking of wonderful worlds removed from reality, I commend resistance to the payment of any bonus to Stephen Hester at RBS and an article by a senior economist formerly at the IMF Europe’s Debt Crisis Is Still Likely to End Badly: Simon Johnson - Bloomberg