Roald

It’s just a fact that, for all their wonder and whimsy, Roald Dahl‘s children’s books can be terrifying. The heroine of Matilda, abandoned to a strict school by uncaring parents, must survive the cruelties of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. Unlike the friendly giant of the title, the other giants in The BFG snatch humans to eat from their beds every night. The Witches concerns a conspiracy of demonic crones bent on eradicating kids altogether. In other words, Dahl’s often macabre fantasies are not safe spaces…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeAgainst the odds, Wonka is a winner. It was supposed to be the prequel nobody asked for, an utterly unnecessary addendum to one of the great works of children’s fiction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It seemed like it was addled by unflattering CGI. Its buzzy young star, Timothée Chalamet, was miscast – how could anyone fill Gene Wilder’s shoes? Now that critics have actually seen…

Hidden away in the garden of Gipsy House in Buckinghamshire was a cosy little shed where Roald Dahl penned some of his most phizz-whizzing stories. For Dahl, as for any writer, his daily workspace was a sacred place of creative incubation, a safe refuge from the external world that allowed him to be alone with his many internal ones. This consecrated writing shed and all the elements that were slaves to Dahl’s imagination are recreated to forensic perfection by Wes Anderson in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWonka only works as a prequel to 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory if we’ve suffered collective amnesia. Remember how much of the original film is dedicated to the inflicting of Old Testament-style punishments on ungrateful children? Or the outré foxiness of Gene Wilder’s central performance? This new Wonka – and its star Timothée Chalamet – certainly doesn’t retain that.…

The Roald Dahl museum has acknowledged the author’s antisemitism in a statement published on its website and to be displayed on a panel at its entrance.Dahl’s racism was “undeniable and indelible”, the museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, said. Its statement comes more than two and a half years after Dahl’s family apologised for his antisemitism.The statement from the museum, which is a charity, said Dahl was a “contradictory person”. There were “recorded incidents of him being very unkind and worse, including…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWarner Bros has released the highly anticipated first trailer for Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet as the titular chocolatier created by Roald Dahl.The Paul King (Paddington) film serves as a prequel to Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which follows competition winner Charlie Bucket on a tour of Willy Wonka’s magical chocolate factory.“Wonka tells the…

The common wisdom that “the book is usually better than the film” is as true of children’s literature as of its adult counterpart: cinema is stacked with adaptations of children’s classics that may be perfectly proficient, but haven’t the inspired individuality of the works at their source.Devotees of Roald Dahl have learned this a lot over the years. His offbeat humour and offhand storytelling style, so irresistible to kids, rarely translates all the way to screen — it’s thwarted such titans as Steven Spielberg, who…

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My earliest reading memoryI’m six years old, up a tree, reading The Travels of Magnus Pole by Jonathan Wills. No one can reach me. The post-psychedelic aesthetic and oddness of 1970s children’s books still fills me with a nostalgic glow.My favourite book growing upMy Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, about a city boy who runs away to the Catskills, sparked something inside, as did Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. Both conveyed a message of independence, transgression and a reverence for the…

Back in the days when everything took place on Zooms and Teams, I was part of a World Book Day event that was livestreamed from the set of the hit musical Matlida. The set is magical: a child’s swing with an explosion of books fire-working up behind it. Now, of course, Matilda has become a battlefield in the Roald Dahl chapter of our culture wars.It is worth noting that World Book Day has always been a battlefield. Every year teachers, carers and librarians defend the joy of reading from the forces of darkness. Almost as…