"The clue to the enduring fascination and greatness of the Alice books lies in language, and the way in which we are made of language quite as much as of flesh and blood and passions. The Freud who analysed the linguistic mechanisms of jokes is a better guide to the essence of Alice than the Freud of the dreamed sexual metaphor, key and keyhole, tears and amniotic fluid, of The Interpretation of Dreams . Alice was loved by Joyce and by Nabokov, who translated the books into Russian. It is play and word-play, and its endless intriguing puzzles continue to reveal themselves long after we have ceased to be children. But it seems important to be able to remember the first innocent reading, the first flexing of the muscles of the mind. I thought for years that I myself had made the link in my own mind between the lost rose garden full of children and laughter in TS Eliot's Four Quartets and the inaccessible garden in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Then I discovered that the connection was in Eliot's mind also."