"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is a well loved book from my childhood and I have referred to one of my favourite quotes from it, in the novel I am currently working on.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was not only a story teller but also a mathematician and wrote several academic works such as "A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry" and "An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations". I cannot pretend to have read them but I did enjoy "Alice Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" which includes the famous poems "Jabberwocky" (in which the Bandersnatch first appeared) and oyster eating frenzy of the "The Walrus and the Carpenter" which begins with the sun shining at night.

I think it was Lewis Carroll first showed me the delights of the absurd.