Augustus Gloop is no longer “enormously fat”. He is simply enormous. Matilda’s fearsome hammer-throwing headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, does not now have a “great horsey face” that turns the colour of molten lava when she is angry. She just has a face. In my 1983 edition of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, readers are warned that witches “dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs ... working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman or driving around in a fancy car”. Today’s young...