I heard he was a right shagger in his youth and that Fleming was stationed with him in D.C, and based James Bond on Dahl, which is actually believable if you read his biographies. Roald Dahl was based, certainly for his time. However he is also suspicious. He had success in hollywood and he does that thing in his books where the parents are absent in one way or another and children end up surrounded by freaks, eg Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach. BFG literally has a child kidnap where the victim is made dependent on the kidnapper for protection and comes to "love" him and that lizard who sits in Buckingham Palace is a hero in the story. His works are still some of my favorite books from childhood but they definitely need contextualizing and re framing. I was a small child in the 80s and child abuse was more casual then. Nowadays children seem more likely to be overly protected rather than neglected, whereas when I was reading Dahl it was easy to identify with the protagonists with abusive or neglectful parents. I like to think he was a good guy, the BFG (whom Dahl strongly identified with) did try to improve the lives of the children who were at the mercy of pedovores by sending them dreams. Where COULD he have got such an idea?