Biographies & Memoirs

Plate Section

Roald – aged three and already tall for his age – with his mother, Sofie Magdalene, the towering figure of his childhood, in the gardens of Ty Mynedd, c.1919.

Dressed for the holidays, Roald with his sisters (from left: Asta, Else and Alfhild), c.1924.

‘Our life together was the stuff of which movies are made,’ filmstar Patricia Neal would claim of her marriage to Roald. In 1953, their honeymoon destinations included Rome.

At home in Great Missenden in 1962, Pat and Roald and their three eldest children: from left, Theo, Tessa and Olivia.

Shutterstock; Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

All smiles in 1964, a year before Pat’s strokes irreversibly altered the pattern of Roald’s family life.

Shutterstock; Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Dolphins and a Bacchic herm ornament this elaborate eighteenth-century mirror, one of several Roald restored after learning how to water gild.

Roald at sixty, physically a little dented, his imagination still vibrant.

In this uncertain image from 1960 of Roald with Tessa and Olivia are few signs of the vigour of Roald’s doting parenting.

More than twenty years his junior, Felicity (‘Liccy’) Crosland would become the second Mrs Roald Dahl in 1983.

‘I long to sit quietly in Gipsy House, which I adore,’ wrote Roald, of the house he and Pat bought in 1954, which remained his home until his death.

Roald, his grandson Luke and a gipsy caravan-shaped birthday cake, in the shadow of Roald’s writing hut at Gipsy House.

Worldwide fame took Roald across the world. In 1988, he signed books at a children’s bookshop in Amsterdam.

Roald’s partnership with Quentin Blake began in 1976 and lasted beyond Roald’s death.

‘So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.’ Illustration by Quentin Blake.

‘The only nice and jumbly Giant in Giant Country’: the BFG as pictured by Quentin Blake.

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