The BFG (Book & CD)

Product Information

Dahl used to belong to the only country club in South Wales that allowed Jewish members. My father and grandfather were members in their time. He once objected very loudly to the number of Jews dining there and how it fouled the atmosphere. The management threw him out and banned him. He is supposed to have done something similar at a gambling club in London with the same result! Between 1986 and 1998, the novel was adapted into a newspaper comic by journalist Brian Lee and artist Bill Asprey. It was published in the Mail on Sunday and originally a straight adaptation, with scripts accepted by Roald Dahl himself. After a while the comic started following its own storylines and continued long after Dahl's death in 1990. [33] Stage play [ edit ] I really love this book. It's pretty short but the story is very joyful. The BFG is a good giant, he intrigued me with his own language from the first. Sophie is a girl kidnapped from her bed and her adventure just begins when she and the BFG have to stop the ruthless giants before they devour all of human beans. He also explains what he was doing with the trumpet and suitcase. He catches dreams, stores them in the cave, and then gives the good ones to children all around the world. He destroys the bad ones. Sophiechen und der Riese" (in German). Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. 1985. Archived from the original on 3 June 2016 . Retrieved 30 June 2016.

The Witching Hour Sophie couldn't sleep. A brilliant moonbeam was slanting through a gap in the curtains. It was shining right on to her pillow. The other children in the dormitory had been asleep for hours. Sophie closed her eyes and lay quite still. She tried very hard to doze off. It was no good. The moonbeam was like a silver blade slicing through the room on to her face. The house was absolutely silent. No voices came up from downstairs. There were no footsteps on the floor above either. The window behind the curtain was wide open, but nobody was walking on the pavement outside. No cars went by on the street. Not the tiniest sound could be heard anywhere. Sophie had never known such a silence. Perhaps, she told herself, this was what they called the witching hour. The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world to themselves. The moonbeam was brighter than ever on Sophie's pillow. She decided to get out of bed and close the gap in the curtains. You got punished if you were caught out of bed after lights-out. Even if you said you had to go to the lavatory, that was not accepted as an excuse and they punished you just the same. But there was no one about now, Sophie was sure of that. 8 Quentin Blake was born in 1932 and read English at Cambridge, before attending Chelsea Art College. He has won many major prizes for illustration, including the Kate Greenaway Medal (1980) and the Red House Children's Book Award (1981) for Mister Magnolia. He is also the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration and in 1990 was voted 'The Illustrator's Illustrator' by Observer Magazine. A tireless promoter of children's literature – and a long-time collaborator with roald Dahl – Quentin Blake was awarded the OBE in 1988 and in 2005 he was awarded a CBE for services to Children's Literature. In the most recent New Year’s Honours list he has been knighted. The Bloodbottler: Second-in-command to the Fleshlumpeater and also the smartest of the bunch. He has a fondness for the taste of human blood. Voiced by Don Henderson in the 1989 film and motion-captured by Bill Hader in the 2016 film. Like many others, I remember the Roald Dahl books that I read, or had read to me, during my childhood fondly, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and especially, Matilda. Perhaps because I expected to have the same childhood reading adventure as I had with those books, I liked, but did not love, The BFG. I think that Dahl's idea for the story is a creative one, but little things, such as the puns on the names of countries when the BFG describes the taste of "human beans" in those countries, or what I think were stereotypical remarks at the end of the novel. For instance, when Dahl describes thankful world leaders bestowing gifts upon Sophie and the BFG for saving their people from man-eating giants, he writes that "The Rule of India sent the BFG a magnificent elephant...The King of Arabia sent them a camel each. The Lama of Tibet sent them a llama each" (pp. 204-5). However, to me, the worst line was when the Queen of England called the Sultan, "next best thing" to a Lord Mayor to ask him whether any of his subjects had mysteriously disappeared recently, and he responds, "Every night unpleasant things are happening in Baghdad...We are chopping off people's heads like you are chopping parsley" (p. 174). One of the biggest chatbags is the cattlepiddlers,' the BFG said. 'What do they say?' 'They is argying all the time about who is going to be the prettiest butteryfly. That is all they is ever talking about.' 'Is there a dream floating around in here now?' Sophie asked. The BFG moved his great ears this way and that, listening intently. He shook his head. 'There is no dream in here,' he said, 'except in the bottles. I has a special place to go for catching dreams. They is not often coming to Giant Country.' 'How do you catch them?' 'The same way you is catching butteryflies,' the BFG answered. 'With a net.' He stood up and crossed over to a corner of the cave where a pole was leaning against the wall. The pole was about thirty feet long and there was a net on the end of it. 'Here is the dream- catcher,' he said, grasping the pole in one hand. 'Every morning I is going out and snitching new dreams to put in my bottles.' Suddenly, he seemed to lose interest in the conversation. 'I is getting hungry,' he said. 'It is time for eats.' 40Five things you never knew about the bfg". The Roald Dahl Story Company Limited . Retrieved 3 September 2020. When Sophie tells the Bfg that they must stop the other giants from eating people he sais that this can’t be done. Weird right? I mean he is a good guy why wont he help? The answer is simple, not only there are 9 of them, their all are twice the size of him. When the giant grubs her with his big arms she’s certain that he will eat her. She was wrong, not that giants don’t eat kids it’s just that this giant doesn’t eat kids or humans in general. Because this giant, this giant is the BFG (Big friendly giant). He takes her to his home and although he is a very nice guy he can’t let her go because he is afraid that she will tell everybody that giants exist and people will hunt them. However he protects her from the other 9 man eating giants. There is also a discussion on Bignessetc on his general misogyny and unpleasant character leading his publishing company, Knopf, who made a lot of money from him to write,

Racial insensitivity (though this is also kind of a redeeming factor). Dahl's bit about human beans and how they taste is hilarious, but also kind of meh. Also, the annoying treatment of the entire Middle East by the Queen of England? She should know better.

Keep up to date with your professional development

There are no female giants. Just males. How they were born? We don't know exactly. They just appear. What will be their end? We don't know exactly about it either. They will just disappear and nobody will know.

This was full of adventures. I think any kids could easily have loved this. I've also come to appreciate Dahl’s wry humour and his new never-been-seen-on-dictionaries vocabularies have marked his writing style as unique. 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. Late night, you can’t sleep. Moonlight hits your eyes so you get up to close the curtains. What do you see? Probably nothing, you just close the curtains and return to bed. That’s not the case for Sophie. She saw something, she saw himAnother Roald Dahl book that I read to my daughter (well, mostly I read it, she read a few chapters to me), about a chapter a night, most nights...