On a summer's afternoon, Oxford is looking as it does in the imagination, clad in shades of glowing saffron. Tourists are trickling out of Christ Church, the grandest of all the colleges and even more of a draw since its hall landed the plum role of Hog-warts' dining room in the Harry Potter films. Some of the tourists will know that it also has an older claim to fame in children's literature: it is where Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was teaching maths when he told a story to amuse three girls in a boat, the daughters of the dean of the college, about the adventures of a child called Alice. As he sat in his rooms in the early 1860s, expanding that story into a book, Dodgson had a view down Pembroke Street.
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