Before writing Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl was a fighter pilot and worked in British intelligence.
Dahl flew Hurricanes for the Royal Air Force in the Second World War and survived a crash in the Libyan desert. Posted to Washington in 1942, he passed information to British intelligence while charming American high society.
Why is this true?
His first published piece was an account of the crash, commissioned by an author who wanted stories from the war. The injuries he suffered troubled him for the rest of his life.
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Famous people accumulate stories, and only some of them are true. The entries in this category stick to documented episodes: the patents, the letters, the odd habits recorded by people who were actually there. Where a story is commonly retold in an exaggerated form, the explanation says so, which makes these facts safer to repeat than the version that usually circulates online.