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).