I’ve lived in Toronto since 1987 but come back to Britain every year to visit friends and family. This magazine was one of my first employers and in 1983 the then-editor Hugh Stephenson asked me to speak to the famous children’s author Roald Dahl. Dahl had just reviewed a book for the Literary Review called God Cried, which covered Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon but went much further than criticizing Israel. He wrote of “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers” and claimed that the US was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that the Americans “dare not defy” Israel.
Stephenson asked me, the youngest journalist in the office, to “have a chat with him and see if he regrets any of that nonsense.” I did. He didn’t. The author of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox and the rest told me, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” and “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”. He said that when he was in the forces during World War Two, he and his friends never saw any Jewish fighting men.
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