Anyone who's read any of Roald Dahl's grownup fiction--Switch Bitch, say, or Kiss Kiss--will know that he was not just your ordinary Beloved Children's Author. Yet this is a little more than I was prepared to digest:
According to a new biography, children's author Roald Dahl was not only a British spy stationed in Washington, D.C., during the early forties, tasked with convincing powerful American dignitaries to commit to Europe; he was, apparently, some kind of special sex spy. Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers was a conquest, along with Time magazine publisher Henry Robinson Luce's wife. This was all in the line of duty, of course: According to the report in the Telegraph, Clare "Booth Luce proved so frisky, Dahl later claimed to have begged his superiors to take him off the assignment, only to be told to get back into the bedroom."
Don't follow the link unless you're prepared to learn what the young Dahl was really renowned for in America.
--Christopher Orr