Mr and Mrs Twit are possibly the vilest of all Roald Dahl’s creations. They are ugly on the inside, as is evident from the cruel tricks they play on each other and the way they treat the Muggle-Wump monkeys, and utterly disgusting on the outside! The very thought of Mrs Twit’s cooking is enough to make grown-ups turn green, and as for Mr Twit’s beard …
To pay Mrs Twit back for the worms in his spaghetti, Mr Twit thought up a really clever, nasty trick . . . Mr Twit is a foul and smelly man who always has bits of cornflake and sardine in his beard. Mrs Twit is scheming and sly and always thinking of the next horrible trick to play on her husband.
The Twits are so ghastly and evil that they even keep Muggle-Wump the monkey and his family captive in their garden. But not for much longer! The monkeys are planning to trick the terrible Twits so that they can escape and put a stop to the frightful pair once and for all!
Roald Dahl was born in Wales of Norwegian parents – the child of a second marriage. His father and elder sister died when Roald was just three. His mother was left to raise two stepchildren and her own four children. Roald was her only son.
He had an unhappy time at school - at Llandaff Cathedral School, at St Peter’s prep school in Weston-super-Mare and then at Repton in Derbyshire.
Dahl’s unhappy time at school was to influence his writing greatly. He once said that what distinguished him from most other children’s writers was “this business of remembering what it was like to be young”. Roald’s childhood and schooldays are the subject of his autobiography Boy.
Since Roald Dahl’s death, his books have more than maintained their popularity. Total sales of the UK editions are around 37 million, with more than 1 million copies sold every year! Sales have grown particularly strongly in America where Dahl books are now achieving the bestselling status that curiously proved elusive during the author’s lifetime.
