Did Dahl even like children?

Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected

Matthew Dennison

Head of Zeus, £20, 264 pages

Perhaps my favourite Roald Dahl story – and one not, alas, recounted by Matthew Dennison in his new biography of the author – comes in Kingsley Amis’s Memoirs. Amis encountered Dahl at an awkward 1970s literary party thrown by Tom Stoppard, and the two authors, who were never natural bedfellows, immediately talked about writers’ favourite topic: money. After Dahl ribbed Amis about his respectable but hardly earth-shattering earnings from literary fiction, he then suggested that Amis write a children’s book. Amis protested that he had “no feeling for that kind of thing”, to which Dahl replied: “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.”