Roald Dahl by Jeremy Treglown Page A

Farrar Straus Giroux), and those with Walt Disney and the BBC. I was fortunate in being able to discuss some of this correspondence with people who were involved, especially Claudia Marsh and Dahl’s most important editors: Virginie Fowler Elbert, Robert Gottlieb, and Stephen Roxburgh.
    On pages 305–7, I make many other acknowledgments both to individuals and to institutions: people who had met Dahl and who wrote to me or spoke to me on the phone, editors at magazines in which his work appeared, libraries which hold materials about him, his foreign publishers, and so on—an alarming number of debts for so small a book. I also acknowledge there the owners of copyrights in materials from which I have quoted. My warmest thanks, however, go to those who knew Dahl or an aspect of his life well, and who agreed to be interviewed—in some cases more than once. Apart from those already mentioned, they are: Liz Attenborough, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Robert and Helen Bernstein, Quentin Blake, Harold Jack Bloom, John Bradburn, Amanda Conquy, Camilla Corbin, Betsy Drake, Creekmore Fath, Colin Fox, Martha Gellhorn, Brough Girling, Edmund and Marian Goodman, Maria Tucci Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, Antoinette Haskell, Douglas Highton, Angela Kirwan Hogg, Robin Hogg, Ken Hughes, Alice Keene, Tony Lacey, Tom Maschler, Peter Mayer, David Ogilvy, Antony Pegg, Charles Pick, Ian Rankin, Alastair Reid, Gerald Savory, Sir David Sells, Roger Straus, Mel Stuart, Kenneth Till, Rayner Unwin, and Kaye Webb.
    Several of these people also spent time reading and commenting on drafts—of the whole book in the cases of PatriciaNeal and Dennis Pearl, and of individual sections in those of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Blake, Robert Gottlieb, Valerie Eaton Griffith, and Alice Keene. I am grateful for their suggestions and factual corrections. Any mistakes which remain are, of course, my own.
    One of the book’s subjects is the creative role of publishers’ editors. So I am even more aware than I would have been anyway of my debt to Susanne McDadd and Julian Loose at Faber & Faber, who suggested that I write it and, along with Stephen Roxburgh and John Glusman at Farrar Straus Giroux and my agent, Deborah Rogers, made useful criticisms of successive drafts. My friend and former TLS colleague, Alan Hollinghurst, also read and commented helpfully on the typescript.
    Among the best editors I know is my wife, Holly, but that is the least I have to thank her for.

Image Gallery

    Dahl’s mother, Sofie Hesselberg, c. 1910, before her marriage to Harald Dahl. (Kaare Hesselberg)

    The Norwegian Church in Cardiff, where Dahl and his sisters were baptised. (Ewart Parkinson)

    At Elm Tree House School, Llandaff. Dahl’s sisters Asta and Elsa are on the far left, Alfhild in the middle of the same row. (Elm Tree House)

    Dahl at Repton, aged seventeen, from the Priory House photograph album. (Repton School)

    The Priory House football team, Repton, winter 1932. Dahl, who played outside left, is in the middle of the back row. (John F. Barclay)

    One of Matthew Smith’s portraits of Dahl, painted in 1941. (Alice Keene)

    Matthew Smith in London, early 1940s. (Alice Keene)

    Charles Marsh, shortly before the Second World War. (Antoinette Haskell)

    Alfred Knopf. (Fabian Bachrach)

Further Acknowledgments
    Apart from those mentioned at the beginning of this book, I am grateful to many individuals who assisted in various ways, not least by answering letters, responding to advertisements, or simply getting in touch with information about Roald Dahl. I can’t mention them all individually. For example, large numbers of Reptonians and former members of 80 Squadron, RAF, replied to circular letters from me, apologizing for the fact that they had no memories of Dahl; and I had scores of answers (the first of them, from Francis Wyndham) to a published inquiry about the original publication of Curt Siodmak’s “Donovan’s