Roald Dahl: A Biography by Jeremy Treglown

Dahl was my hero as a child, I wanted to be a writer creating the amazing inventive imaginative intelligent child heroes I could want to be, not bullied for being intelligent but getting their own back on adults and evil contemporaries alike. Yes, he was notoriously misanthropic towards adults, didn't suffer fools and was bad tempered, but I had a father who was much the same, a mix of brilliant wit and unkindness, so genius coming with complete antipathy towards people was familiar to me.

Treglown takes us easily through the life of Dahl from his Welsh roots in a Norwegian community through service in the RAF and, after wounded, to a slightly shadowy life as a UK liaison officer in Washington, to the end of his life with his second wife and world wide fame as a major children's author. I learned many new things about Dahl's life and the tragedies that beset it, and came away with a sense of Dahl much as I had understood him and more, vain, self aggrandizing, social climber and in many ways not a very nice person, but deeply human.