The countryside filled the Matilda author Roald Dahl with joy and proved a constant source of inspiration, as Matthew Dennison reveals in a new biography of the prolific storyteller.
Roald Dahl’s attachment to the country ran deep. In the year he died, he claimed that he had ‘never lived in a town or city in my life and I would hate to do so’. Like Danny’s father in Danny the Champion of the World, he regarded himself as ‘a true countryman’: ‘the…