Irish Examiner view: Revision of Roald Dahl stories simply unnecessary

News that ‘sensitivity readers’ had been hired to re-examine the texts of author Roald Dahl seems to be another form of historical negationism.

Augustus Gloop, the gluttonous antagonist in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', is no longer described as 'enormously fat', just 'enormous'.

Revisionism has its good and bad points. 

It usually involves challenging widely held and accepted views of our past, and in its most positive form can reflect new discoveries of evidence, fact, or interpretation, reversing previously accepted versions of truth. Legitimate historical revisionism puts a new slant on the accepted orthodoxy of incidents in our past which have subsequently shaped the world in which we live.