This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
A problem I often face when listening to podcasts is dealing with the feeling that their creators obviously think I’m an idiot. For them, I need constant reassurance that what I am listening to is interesting or informative. “Welcome to his deeply bizarre universe,” says Aaron Tracy in the first episode of The Secret World of Roald Dahl, “I promise it only gets stranger from here.” Show me. Don’t tell me.
To make matters worse, there is constant music burbling in the background, as if the creators feel compelled to drown out the voices in my head. It’s the kind of music that might torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is full of inexplicably informal language. My favourite documentary is The World at War, and, whilst it would be unfair to judge Tracy’s podcast by this lofty standard, I can’t imagine how much less regarded the Thames Television classic would be if Laurence Olivier had introduced a digression by saying, “Let me pause here for a sec.” You don’t have to do this, Mr Tracy! If we’re listening to this podcast, we are presumably literate.
Tracy opens with a strange premise. “When my wife and I hire a babysitter, you’d better believe that we do a little digging into who she is,” he tells us, with annoying chattiness, “but we just happily bring Dahl into our children’s rooms.”
Well, no, you bring his books in. I would give Alice in Wonderland to a child, but, if Lewis Carroll somehow came back from the grave and went near a child, I would beat him with an iron rod.
Still, as much as Tracy’s style seems unserious, he has approached his subject matter seriously. The Secret World of Roald Dahl is full of rich and fascinating detail about the strange life of a man for whom the word “multi-talented” seems insufficient.
Being a fighter ace and an effective spy during the Second World War and collaborating on a medical invention that saved the lives of thousands of children, would make for an astonishingly successful life even if he weren’t also one of the most successful children’s authors of all time.
Dahl, famously, was also a controversial man. He was cold and unfaithful in his private life and his books could be suffused with mean-spiritedness. In his later years, he had a pronounced tendency towards anti-Semitism (“even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”).
Tracy is right that to make these points is not just to indulge in “woke” puritanism. They haunted Dahl when he was alive.
This all makes Tracy feel “queasy” about enjoying Dahl’s books. Well, I don’t disagree that Dahl’s fiction has a deep seam of cruelty. Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt might have been obnoxious children, but I’m not sure they deserved such colourful punishments.
That said, Dahl, unlike a lot of no doubt nicer people, understood that children are fascinated by the frightening and the grotesque. I think we can trust kids to not be literal-minded and to think about moral ambiguities rather than being spoon-fed lessons. Modern attempts to rewrite the language of his books are not just censorious but evidence of a pathetic cultural safetyism.
I am sure Dahl could be an unpleasant man. It seems like he could be very difficult to know. What sounds like a sincere moral opposition to Israeli foreign policy also clearly devolved into a generalised dislike for Jewish people.
Tracey might present this in an irritating manner — can we please retire the word “problematic” for good? — but he does a thorough job of laying out the evidence for the prosecution. For example, Dahl was kicked out of a social club for holding forth about the number of Jewish members.
Tracy uncomfortably addresses the question of whether we can separate an artist from their art. Erich Hatala Matthes, author of Drawing the Line, makes the case that we should interrogate art in the light of what we know about an artist.
I’m not sure if this is true — and Matthes’ own dark suggestions about Dahl’s story “Genesis and Catastrophe” appears to rest on forgetting the third word of its title — but let us assume for a moment that it is correct.
Dahl was indeed a bigot, and this is a shame. But it would be wrong to reduce him to his bigotry. The man was also a fighter ace who served his nation in a world war, a philanthropist who quietly funded children’s health, a man who helped to create an invention that saved children’s lives and, of course, a man who entertained millions of children. The ambition, dedication and love for children that this displays should be included on his personal record.
I’m not saying that Dahl could not have achieved this whilst being a nicer man — I’m just saying that a lot of nicer people have achieved far less.
The most interesting people are not necessarily the most attractive. Tracy, who obsesses over everything from Dahl’s espionage career to his writing hut, does a solid, even powerful job of conveying how interesting Dahl and his books were.
We can disagree with Dahl without feeling guilty about our admiration for him, just as a child could enjoy Willy Wonka without delighting in the gruesome fate of Augustus Gloop.
