Happy 150th to Alice in Wonderland, the mother of all quirky books
It's 150 years today since Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published, three years after Charles Dodgson told the story to the Liddell sisters as they boated down the Thames. Together with its sequel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There , it is now known by all of us as Alice in Wonderland , and by me as one of my favourite books of all time. For the occasion, I thought I'd republish the love letter to Alice I wrote for a Quirky Books series we ran on our website many years ago, which I called: The mother of all quirky books Because of everyone who's loved it or borrowed from it, from Virginia Woolf to the Jefferson Airplane; because Wonderland is where surrealistic starts; because the characters play croquet with flamingos for mallets and don't follow the rules; because the logic is faultless but illogical; because it celebrates absurdity; because of "Contrariwise" and "Off with their heads!"; because Alice wants...