Roald Dahl was one of the most successful writers of children's books ever, both in terms of copies sold and money made. Ten months before his death, the five top-selling children's books in Britain were ones he had written. In 1989 more than 2,300,000 c...

Roald Dahl began his career as a short-story writer after suffering through the horrors of severe canings and other punishments in oppressive British schools during the 1920s and 1930s and after enduring the horrors of military service as a Royal Air For...

Roald Dahl was flying over the African desert for the Royal Air Force during World War II when he was forced to make an emergency landing. He wrote in his first short story, "A Piece of Cake," "I remember the dipping of the nose of the aircraft and I rem...

Aunt Jeanne was the letter writer, but Uncle Zel would pick up the telephone regularly to call us from California to find out how we were doing. In early 1978, he called and said, "I have a friend in Washington. I told him about...

My Uncle Ezekiel's body was discovered in a ditch early on Christmas morning, three years ago. Beside him was an empty bottle of cheap whisky; I still remember the red and green label on it, with the inscription: Christian Brothers. Because of the empty...

We know that God has a sense of humor, said de Maupassant, from the manner he has chosen for us to reproduce ourselves. This view of copulation as undignified and absurd is the theme of [My Uncle Oswald], a short, snappy burlesque of sex novels and sex. (p. 37) [The] joke is not in the intrinsic brilliance of Dahl's dialogue, but in our matching his premise with our knowledge of his famous victims. When—sometimes in mid-sentence—intellect is overtaken by embarrassing necessity, we have ...

If only Uncle Oswald had had a twist—or, better still, a knot—in his member, we might have been spared many of Roald Dahl's descriptions of its size, colour, pulse and agility. As matters are, it is for ever standing up to be counted. It is brave of Mr Dahl to have written a novel with a totally dislikeable hero, but I suspect that this was not his intention; Uncle Oswald's only admirer may be his creator, as if God had started off with Father Rolfe. I don't believe that m...

Hardly straining itself in the originality line, [My Uncle Oswald] shows Oswald involved with the discovery of a pill so potent that any man who takes it is unable to prevent himself from ravishing a woman on the spot. The one new idea is to incorporate the aphrodisiac into a scheme to steal the sperm of the famous, this celebrity-seed then being sold, at a high price, to women keen to bear the child of an outstanding man…. As may be imagined, this is not a situation that allows for much variety. Eve...