His instinct, as with Bond, is not to do the obvious thing: “The question of paedophilia comes up all the time in relation to those two men [JM Barrie and Charles Dodgson] but it was never my concern. I don’t believe they molested the children – in a way, the damage was perhaps more profound than that because Alice Liddell and the Davies boys were objects of obsessive love. The relationship was always a melancholy one – those adults knew that the children, their muses, would grow up and leave them – and that sadness to me was the more significant dramatic point.”