In 2003, Matilda was listed at number 74 in The Big Read, a BBC survey of the British public of the top 200 novels of all time. I'm certainly anti-Israeli and I've become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism.

In 2012, Matilda was ranked number 30 among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily US audience.The Witches was originally published by Jonathan Cape in London, with illustrations by Quentin Blake who had previously collaborated with Dahl. He invented over 500 new words by scribbling down his words before swapping letters around and adopting spoonerisms and malapropisms. During the editing process, the editor Stephen Roxburgh told Dahl that he was concerned about misogyny in the book. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason. S. Forester asked him to provide details of his experiences in North Africa which Forester hoped to use in an article in The Saturday Evening Post.

In a biography of Dahl, Matthew Dennison wrote that "his writing frequently included protests against unfairness". Dahl reviewed Australian author Tony Clifton's God Cried, a picture book about the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War. thousands of lives were lost, and I for one have never forgiven the Vichy French for the unnecessary slaughter they caused.The library in Great Missenden was the inspiration for Mrs Phelps's library, where Matilda devours classic literature by the age of four and three months. In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as an aircraftman with service number 774022. Perhaps this, more than anything, is the reason why Dahl's stories excite the imagination of so many adults and children, and why so many storytellers across stage and screen can't resist remaking his tales in their own individual style.