‘I’m a perfectly ordinary fellow, except that I happen to be very tall,’ Roald Dahl told a group of children in 1975.
He was indeed large. At his public school, Repton, Dahl was unusual in the early 1930s in being six foot five by his mid-teens. It was one reason – alongside his broken voice – that he was chosen for the hero’s part in a class reading of Romeo and Juliet.
His size became central to Dahl’s identity. Repeatedly – and for better, as well as
