Roald Dahl is the author behind some of the best-loved children’s books of all time, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda and The Twits.

The author, who passed away in 1990, served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. He went on to sell more than 250m copies of his books worldwide, with a partnership with Quentin Blake as inseparable a marriage of author and illustrator as that between Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, or AA Milne and EH Shepard.

And yet Roald Dahl was also a highly complex character, as the Royal Mint’s decision to scrap a commemorative coin in his honour attests.

We hold Enid Blyton to account for the more regrettable attitudes revealed by her prose and should not spare Dahl the same scrutiny. Nor should we allow the man’s personal failings to overshadow his adored body of work, one of the most remarkably inventive in the history of English literature.

40 books to read while self-isolating Show all 40 1 /40 40 books to read while self-isolating 40 books to read while self-isolating Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain. 40 books to read while self-isolating Catch 22, Joseph Heller It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage. 40 books to read while self-isolating Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming. 40 books to read while self-isolating Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work. 40 books to read while self-isolating 1984, George Orwell The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind. 40 books to read while self-isolating To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum. 40 books to read while self-isolating Great Expectations, Charles Dickens Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts. 40 books to read while self-isolating Frankenstein, Mary Shelley Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lord of the Flies, William Golding Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile. 40 books to read while self-isolating Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities. 40 books to read while self-isolating Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb 40 books to read while self-isolating Middlemarch, George Eliot This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously. 40 books to read while self-isolating Secret History, Donna Tartt Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home. 40 books to read while self-isolating Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch. 40 books to read while self-isolating Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door. 40 books to read while self-isolating Beloved, Toni Morrison Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history. 40 books to read while self-isolating Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dune, Frank Herbert You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised. 40 books to read while self-isolating Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond. 40 books to read while self-isolating A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece. 40 books to read while self-isolating Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides. 40 books to read while self-isolating Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed. 40 books to read while self-isolating Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dracula, Bram Stoker Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men. 40 books to read while self-isolating Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963. 40 books to read while self-isolating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy. 40 books to read while self-isolating Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side. 40 books to read while self-isolating Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad. 40 books to read while self-isolating 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Trial, Frank Kafka “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance. 40 books to read while self-isolating Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker. 40 books to read while self-isolating The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.

Dahl’s novels are often dark affairs, filled with cruelty, bereavement and Dickensian adults prone to gluttony and sadism. The author clearly felt compelled to warn his young readers about the evils of the world, taking the lesson from earlier fairy tales that they could stand hard truths and would be the stronger for hearing them.

With this extraordinary writer in mind, here’s our selection of his 10 finest works.

10. George’s Marvellous Medicine (1981)

The story of George Kranky, who concocts his own miracle elixir from deodorant, shampoo, floor polish, horseradish sauce, gin, brown paint, engine oil and anti-freeze to replace his tyrannical grandmother’s regular prescription dose in the hope of improving her mood. Dahl’s book had to be issued with a disclaimer warning children not to try this at home.

The author himself ignored the caution, however, enjoying a game with his own family wherein he would mix strangely-coloured drinks from milk, peach juice and other cordials, pretending the result was a magic potion.

George concocting his miracle elixir (Quentin Blake/Puffin Books) (Flickr)

Anticipating Matilda in encouraging children to take revenge on their adult tormentors with practical jokes, it also owes a debt to the “Drink Me” episode in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in blowing up the aged relative to the size of a farmhouse.

9. Danny the Champion of the World (1975)

Expanded from a short story Dahl had published in The New Yorker in 1959, Danny tells the story of a boy growing up with his father William, a garage attendant, in a gipsy caravan beside a wood.

Danny discovers his parent has a sideline as a pheasant poacher and vows to help him catch the entire local flock before the squire, Victor Hazell, can stage a shooting party.

A moving tale of rural poverty alleviated by sudden inspiration, Dahl’s description of the countryside is based on the hills and farmland around Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where he lived, and the resulting work has something in common with Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) in its portrait of boyhood sorrow and loneliness.

Dahl himself owned a Romany wagon much like that described in the book, and wrote the novel sat inside it at the bottom of his garden. It was often a makeshift playroom for his children.

8. James and the Giant Peach (1961)

Dahl often wrote about youngsters whose parents are suddenly taken away from them in shocking circumstances: in the case of James Henry Trotter, his are run down by an escaped rhinoceros during a shopping expedition to London.

Consigned to live as a de facto slave with his cruel aunts on the White Cliffs of Dover, James is given a bag of “crocodile tongues” by a mysterious old man who promises they will bring him joy and adventure. The boy duly spills them in the garden, causing a peach to grow to enormous proportions and eventually roll out to sea, taking James with it.

Henry Selick’s lovely 1996 stop-motion film of James and the Giant Peach (Moviestore Collection/Rex/Shutterstock)

James befriends the eccentric insects living inside it and together the group lash its stem to a flock of seagulls, who fly the peach across the Atlantic to New York City, where it is speared atop the Empire State Building.

A fantastic flight of invention, riffing on Jack and the Beanstalk, Jonathan Swift, surrealism and perhaps even the promise of LSD at the dawn of the psychedelic Swinging Sixties, James and the Giant Peach may be Dahl’s wildest creation.

7. Boy (1984)

This memoir recounts the author’s childhood growing up in Llandaff, Wales, the son of Norweigian parents, and traces his young life through to the end of his tenure at private school and his setting out for a job with Royal Dutch Shell in Tanzania.

Boy is a superb document of life in the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s, but is also highly revealing about the genesis of the writer’s obsessions. “The Great Mouse Plot” - detailing an eight-year-old Roald and his friends hiding a dead rodent inside a gobstopper jar at the local sweetshop to upset its unpleasant owner, Mrs Pratchett - could have come from one of his novels.

Roald Dahl (Getty) (Getty Images)

The violent reprisal, in which Roald was caned by his headmaster while Mrs Pratchett looked on with grim approval, seems to have shaped his unforgiving view of adults thereafter.

Dahl would continue his biography with a second book, Going Solo (1986), recording his war service with the RAF.

Like Danny the Champion of the World, Fantastic Mr Fox is another story drawn from the countryside near Dahl’s home, concerning a roguish father getting one over on local landowners.

Mr Fox’s raiding missions on the poultry and cider stores of villainous farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean (“one fat, one short, one lean”) give us nature red in tooth and claw. One moment in which its chicken shack Robin Hood protagonist loses his tail to a shotgun blast is particularly traumatic.

Wes Anderson made a handsome stop-motion animation of the book in 2009, voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep. He stayed in Dahl’s famous writing shed to compose the screenplay and gave Mrs Fox the maiden name “Felicity” in tribute to the author’s wife, whom he befriended.

5. The Twits (1980)

A highly misanthropic entry, The Twits recounts an arms race between an unhappily married couple, each bidding to humiliate and traumatise the other through an ever-more cruel series of pranks.

Mr Twit’s attempt to convince his wife she is shrinking by adding an extra sliver of wood to her cane every night is as good an illustration of gaslighting as you will ever see, an extraordinarily dark piece of psychology to have included in a book for children, even for a writer as unflinching as Dahl.

The Twits get their comeuppance (Quentin Blake/Puffin Books)

A passage about the unpleasant personality of Mrs Twit eroding her once-attractive face into ugliness is especially fine, while his repulsive description of her husband’s filthy beard attests to a life-long loathing of facial hair. The poet Michael Rosen told BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth in 2016 that the writer had once lambasted him for his own on the set of a TV show.

4. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

Perhaps Dahl’s most widely read book, Charlie captures its author’s own childhood love of sweets – as discussed in Boy - and provides a vehicle for his uncompromising personal morality.

When reclusive confectioner Willy Wonka suddenly announces a plan to include golden tickets inside the wrappers of his chocolate bars, permitting the holder to tour his factory, the promotion creates a media sensation. Against the odds, the impoverished Charlie Bucket finds one and follows the other lucky recipients through the gates.

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in Mel Stuart’s 1971 film, a version disliked by Dahl (Paramount)

For all the wonder Dahl conjures in his description of the chocolate river, Inventing Room and Oompa-Loompas, the novel also carries a decidedly sinister undercurrent, unfolding like a slasher film as the other children are effectively bumped off one by one as their faults and flaws are made apparent, leaving Charlie the last boy standing.

The characters are highly memorable and superbly named - Violet Beauregarde, Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop - and, in Mike Teavee, Dahl offers a satire of materialistic American youth obsessed with screens that was decades ahead of its time. His sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), is even more eccentric.

3. The BFG (1982)

Roald Dahl always had a fascination with wordplay, working out the optimum pun, neologism or nonsense coinage in draft before settling on the definitive version.

Rarely was his use of language more playful than in The BFG, in which the titular Big Friendly Giant speaks in a tongue known as “gobblefunk”: “I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.”

The giant catches dreams in bottles and adopts Sophie - a heroine named after Dahl’s first grandchild - after the girl learns of his existence, taking her on an adventure involving “snozzcumbers”, “frobscottle” and plenty of “whizzpopping”. They encounter rival giants who eat “human beans” and end up at Buckingham Palace to appeal to the Queen for the arrest of said brutes.

2. The Witches (1983)

Unquestionably the writer’s scariest book, this tale of a boy and his cigar-huffing Norwegian grandmother encountering an international conference of witches at a luxury hotel in Bournemouth drew on Dahl’s Scandinavian heritage to flavourful effect.

His characterisation of the harpies – bald, square-toed, pearly-eyed – lives long in the memory, as does the grandmother’s haunting tale of a childhood friend trapped for all time inside a painting.

The Grand High Witch’s genocidal plan to wipe out the children of the world with poisoned confectionery reads like a perversion of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket scheme, while the narrator’s being turned into a mouse looks all the way back to the author’s own youth as described in Boy, that book itself inspired by his having commenced work on The Witches.

It was brilliantly adapted for the screen by the late Nic Roeg in 1990, with Anjelica Houston and Mai Zetterling ideally cast, the former unforgettably grotesque as the Grand High Witch in her true form.

1. Matilda (1988)

Matilda is a child prodigy and precocious reader inexplicably born to the uncouth and profoundly crooked car salesman Harry Wormwood and his vain wife Zinnia.

Mara Wilson, Embeth Davidtz and Pam Ferris in Danny DeVito’s 1996 film of Matilda (TriStar Pictures)

At school, she encounters the perfect teacher Miss Honey - who immediately recognises her gifts - and the tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull, a sadistic former track-and-field athlete with a penchant for flinging girls like a shot put.

Learning the (deeply sinister) truth about the two women’s shared past, Matilda conspires to help her sponsor and bring down her tormentor with the aid of newly discovered telekinetic powers.

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An ode to the joys of reading and an unabashed celebration of the intellect triumphant, Matilda sees Dahl express his black-and-white view of adult behaviour more explicitly than ever.