You're listening to the LLB podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is Colin Barrow,

a fellow of All Souls College Oxford, whose most recent book is imitating authors, Plato to Futurity, and a contributor of many pieces to the London Review

of books. The new Christmas issue of the paper includes his review of Matthew Denison's

unauthorised biography of Roald Dahl, teller of the Unexpected. Hello, Colin, and thank you

very much for joining me again. Hello, Tom, and happy Christmas in advance.

We've both got our party hats on that your listeners won't be able to see that, unfortunately.

I'm sure I'm not alone in having had a sort of queasily oscillating relationship with Roald

Dole's books that I read and loved a lot of them as a child, then came rather to despise

him. And then more recently I've come back round to the books, or some of them, up to a point,

that as a parent on long car journeys with the children listening to the audio books, being

read really quite well

by some very talented actors that Douglas Hodge, rather like Quentin Blake's illustrations,

as you mentioned in the piece, brings whole new levels to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

But now after reading your piece, I'm feeling a lot more doubtful again.

Matthew Dennison's biography is at least the third biography of Dahl since he died in 1990.

Does it tell us anything new, anything unexpected? It mostly tells us things that were already known.

The biography by Jeremy Treglund dug through publishers archives and revealed quite how aggressive Dahl was over money and over his artistic control of his work.

And there's extensive correspondence with his American publishers about the terrible failure to get him the right type of pencil with which to write his books and things

like that. He was clearly an absolute nightmare to work with as a publisher. And indeed, when he

threatened to take his trade away from Knopf, Knopf wrote back and said, yes, please, we'll rejoice. And apparently when that letter

was sent to Roldahl, the staff in the office all stood on their desks and cheered. So he was

clearly an incredibly difficult person to deal with, but also complicated. As you say, he is absolutely the type of writer about whom one should have very mixed

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