The Big Unfriendly Giant

Nobody in their right mind could claim that Roald Dahl was a nice guy. He was a plagiarist, a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and overbearingly rude, even to his benefactors (Knopf, his first publisher, finally gave him the boot). He slept with umpteen women and called his power over them “ridiculously easy, like manipulating puppets”. He was a 6ft 7in real-life, nonfiction monster.

But children worldwide loved his books — James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda — more than anyone else’s. To date, Dahl has sold 250 million books in 58 languages. So resolving the tension between his apparent dislikability and his hot-wire to children’s imaginations is a problem for biographers.