Roald Dahl’s Protocols

In 1983, thanks to an interview in the New Statesman, it was revealed to the world that the beloved children’s author Roald Dahl was a vicious anti-Semite; it was in the same year that he published his novel The Witches, recently adapted as a film with an all-star cast. The book’s premise is that a secret cabal of people—facially indistinguishable from everyone else except for their funny accents and large noses—exercises malign control in every country on earth, while enriching themselves and inflicting suffering on unsuspecting children. While Dara Horn absolves the film of the book’s thinly veiled anti-Semitism, she nonetheless concludes that it cannot escape the original’s perversity: