A themed restaurant done right: The Alice, Oxford, reviewed

The Alice lives in a ground-floor room of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, which venerates the fantastical and the savage, as Oxford does. The savage lives in the Randolph’s dedicated crime museum with cocktails: the (Inspector) Morse Bar. The Alice is named for two women: Alice Liddell, the daughter of the ecclesiastical dean of Christchurch College – the grandest and most unfinished Oxford college – who posed for photographs for Lewis Carroll, became Alice of Wonderland and later invented a ladyship (an act as English as anything that ever happened here).

The first, of course, is more interesting to me, but Liddell was felled by her imago, who is both too big and too small, as women are, and she fell down a rabbit hole, as women do. Alice Liddell was 67 when women were allowed to take degrees at Oxford, and she was dead by the time female quotas were removed in 1957.