His maternal grandmother Ellen Wallace was a granddaughter of the member of parliament Georg Wallace and a descendant of an early 18th-century Scottish immigrant to Norway.

He was buried with his snooker cues, some very good burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw. I wanted to ask him how he could be so absolutely sure that other creatures did not get the same special treatment as us. The booklet is structured as a conversation with children, and it was distributed to primary school pupils in the UK. His awards for contribution to literature include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. It was adapted into a made-for-TV movie in 1989 by Thames Television which starred Jeremy Irons as William and Robbie Coltrane as Mr Victor Hazell.After learning the purpose of Spotty Powder, the humourless, smug Miranda Piker and her equally humourless father (a schoolmaster) are enraged and disappear into the Spotty Powder room to sabotage the machine. The ride featured a boat section, where guests travel around the chocolate factory in bright pink boats on a chocolate river. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialised training in aerial combat or in flying Gladiators. The book is dedicated to Dahl's late daughter, Olivia, who died of measles encephalitis at the age of seven in 1962. Class-conscious themes also surface in works such as Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny, the Champion of the World where the unpleasant wealthy neighbours are outwitted.

For example, the village library was the inspiration for Mrs Phelps' library in Matilda, where the title character devours classic literature by the age of four.Children's novelist and literary historian John Rowe Townsend has described the book as "fantasy of an almost literally nauseating kind" and accused it of "astonishing insensitivity" regarding the original portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas as African black pygmies, although Dahl did revise this in later editions. On 1 April 2006, the British theme park Alton Towers opened a family attraction themed around the story. He viewed the brutality of the caning as being the result of the headmaster's enmity towards children, an attitude Dahl would later attribute to the Grand High Witch in The Witches who exclaims that "children are rrreee-volting! Dahl began to make up bedtime stories for the children, and these formed the basis of several of his stories.