An only boy, warts and all

ANYONE who opens this book expecting to find a friendly giant is in for a disappointment. Big, physically and creatively, he may have been, but friendly might be pushing Roald Dahl beyond the limits of his personality.

It was Dahl’s daughter, Ophelia, who asked Donald Sturrock to write this authorised biography, having been unable to do so herself due to family and work. She asked Sturrock because he had known and liked Dahl and had made an award-winning television film for the BBC about him.

Ophelia believed that only someone who had met her father could knit together the disparate elements of his complex, contradictory and extravagant character. Sturrock succeeds in this and also fulfils his own self-imposed obligation to tell the Dahl story, warts and all, and his knitting includes both work and working methods in its pattern.