Introduction by JEREMY TREGLOWN“In his daily walks through London,” notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, “Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception.” This finely attuned s...
I ended up liking this book more than I thought I would. At the beginning I was turned off by Treglown's initial claims that Dahl was a quarrelsome bully, liar, and plagiarist. These harsh criticisms of a favorite author forced me to read the first few chapters with an equally critical eye, muc...
the young Roald Dahl wrote in a prep-school essay. “They will give you many valuable things.”1 There was even, he continued, the outside chance of discovering a gold mine. It’s a fair precis of what many British people at the time believed. It could almost have been the unofficial policy statemen...