From almost its opening moment, the enquiry by Horrible Histories actor Simon Farnaby into some of the origins of Alice in Wonderland (5 November) declared itself as an exercise in myth busting. Had that legendary “golden afternoon” of 4 July 1862 on which Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) supposedly recited the book for his punting companions, the misses Liddell, actually taken place, Farnaby wondered.The answer, alas, appeared to be no, for meteorological data showed the day to have been rainy and overcast, Dodgson’s biographer Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sternly assured us. Clearly, all this was a compound of a number of vanished afternoons spent storytelling on the Oxford riverbanks. Several other myths, among them the idea that Dodgson dedicated a mathematical treati