Many of these parody assumptions Dean Liddell made in his understanding of Greek, mistakes that have saddled us with flawed scholarship on Aristotle and his logic. Based in Oxford, he created the story for the child of the Dean, the creator of the then great Greek lexicon. That was a poem written years earlier as a teen, to amuse his crotchety parson father, someone obsessed with the perversion of noble Saxon words by effete French. For many people, the stories are simply amusing nonsense for children, something to be fuzzily remembered in the same way as, say, Peter Pan or a Grimm's tale.

But if you cannot understand the soul of what you are working with, you cannot leverage or extend it. One can hardly expect someone like Burton, or anyone making a big budget Disney- distributed project to understand the material. His ordination ruined by his guilt about this, he spent the remainder of his life writing a C S Lewis-like Christian allegory, Sylvie and Bruno to make amends. Before Tim Burton was involved with the project, Anne Hathaway was offered the title role of Alice, but she turned it down because it was too similar to other roles she had previously played. He was a charter member of Oxford's Psychical Society and a student of the inventor of mystical tarot, the self-named Court de Gebelin.