Re the letters criticising Roald Dahl’s works (Roald Dahl’s mean and nasty books don’t deserve all this attention, 23 February), in an oral history interview recorded for the British Library Sound Archive in 2002, the late great children’s books editor Marni Hodgkin told me that she had twice turned down both Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, once at Hart-Davis and again at Macmillan. “You may be amazed they were at liberty for publishers to snap up,” she said (I was). But the books had “a malicious quality” that she did not want to put her name to. “In that, I showed my very deficient business sense, but I have never regretted it,” she said.
Sue Bradley
Corbridge, Northumberland
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