1. Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp, from Tales of The Thousand And One Nights, translated by N. J. Dawood, Penguin Classics edition (1955).

2. Puss In Boots, translated by Robert Samber (1729) from the French version of the traditional folk tale published by Charles Perrault in Histoire ou Contes du Temps Passe (1695), and reprinted in The Classic Fairy Tales by Peter and Iona Opie, OUP (1974).

3. The History of Richard Whittington, Of His Lowe Byrthe, His Great Fortune, published anonymously in 1605.

4. We may note that when The Benny Goodman Story came to be made in 1956, the real-life event on which the scriptwriters chose to conclude the story, the Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, had taken place 18 years earlier. In other words, the special demands of fiction had taken over from factual biography, to provide them with a ‘fairy tale ending’ – the hero winning the ‘Princess’ and succeeding to the ‘kingdom’; even though this meant omitting from the story everything which, in real life, had happened to Goodman subsequently. Such is the power of the underlying archetype to dictate the shape of a story.

5. Robert Irwin points out in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994) that the story of Aladdin first appeared in the French translation of Les Mille et Une Nuits published in Paris by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1715. Before this there is no record of the story, so its origins remain a mystery.