Hardly straining itself in the originality line, [My Uncle Oswald] shows Oswald involved with the discovery of a pill so potent that any man who takes it is unable to prevent himself from ravishing a woman on the spot. The one new idea is to incorporate the aphrodisiac into a scheme to steal the sperm of the famous, this celebrity-seed then being sold, at a high price, to women keen to bear the child of an outstanding man….

As may be imagined, this is not a situation that allows for much variety. Even the narrator fears it may be 'pretty boring for the reader'—as the novel's sex-receptacle trips her giggling way from Freud's 'doodly' to Shaw's 'snozzberry'. Leaden jokes about writers with thin pencils further weigh things down. And the twist at the end, routine in Dahl's writings, manages to be both unsurprising and unbelievable.

Peter Kemp...