Roald Dahl’s Heroes and Villains

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While women tended to slightly favour female characters and men leaned towards males, their top tens suggest reading habits are no longer sharply divided along gender lines. His crime? Stealing a slice of chocolate cake from Matilda’s evil headmistress Miss Trunchbull. For Bruce, there is no banishment to the Chokey this time. Instead, she forces him to eat a whole cake in front of the school as punishment. Witches are demons, and thus they have a demonic set of powers and a demonic hatred of humanity. Thus their magic may come from Satan himself. Helga suggests this at one point by saying "Nobody has seen the Devil, but we all know he exists, don't we?". All Witches originally come from Norway, and thus spread everywhere. There is a secret society of witches in every country, and they do not know each other. For instance, an English witch will know all other English witches, and so on. It is illegal for witches to communicate with foreign witches.

Love books? Join BBC Culture Book Club on Facebook, a community for literature fanatics all over the world. The popular image we have of Dahl – a benign, grandfatherly figure, slightly bent over his writing desk – tends to obscure the extraordinary life he recounts in the book.In the 2020 film adaptation, the appearance of witches remains the same as they are still bald and have toeless, square feet. However, they now have three clawy fingers instead of five and they have elongated mouths showing sharpened teeth that resemble fangs and their tongues can split in two parts. He wrote two autobiographies about his early life and the second – Going Solo – is a brilliant account of the adventures (and traumas) of a young man before and during the Second World War. I remember being so relieved when Muggle-Wump turned the tables on this nasty pair and came up with this genius plan to teach them a lesson.” Mrs Twit Mrs. Zinnia Wormwood is the mother of Michael and Matilda Wormwood and the wife of Harry Wormwood. Mrs. Wormwood plays Bingo five times a week. She’s more concerned about looks than getting an education. However, despite this, Mrs. Wormwood has a soft spot for Matilda. In the movie Mrs. Wormwood's first name is Zinnia. In the musical, Mrs. Wormwood loves ballroom dancing. She is a very large woman in the book, but in the movie, she is quite skinny. At the end she goes to Guam with her husband and Michael never to be seen again. In the musical, her dance instructor, Rudolpho goes with her, Harry and Michael to Guam.

I can still picture it in my head – a tiny wizened evil creature with blue phlegm presiding over a sea of bald, square-footed women. Brr, terrifying. Tarantino couldn’t better it. A key life lesson about the importance of respecting and asserting authority learned by my eight-year-old self. That to go with a new-found tolerance of mice, which my childhood home was infested with but I now realised could be former human children, and a frankly confusing life-long crush on Anjelica Huston.” The Witches was published in 1983 Bruce Bogtrotter I tried to make my own concoction inspired by George one bored summer’s day. The dominant ingredient was Worcester Sauce. Oh the smell. Today, titles like Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG and Matilda, which was released just two years before his death aged 74 in 1990, regularly appear on lists of the best children's books ever – including BBC Culture's own. Collectively, his books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide, their stories also spawning stage and screen adaptations, including a recently announced prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, set to star teen crush Timothée Chalamet as a young Willy Wonka.

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Response and Analysis Y1/2: Explore, understand and express opinions about language, information and events in texts His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. They are led by the evil and deceptive Grand High Witch, who the rest of the witches are terrified of. Unlike the other witches, she did not limit herself to more than one child per week. In fact, she came up with a plan that would ultimately murder all of the children in England. Many of Roald Dahl’s greatest characters are children who defy the idiotic and villainous adults in their lives. None, perhaps, is more heroic than Bruce Bogtrotter. Greedy, yes, but Brucey, 11, is a champion.