Matilda

The class is dismissed. You may all go out into the playground and wait for your parents to come and take you home.’

My idea of a perfect school, Miss Honey, is one that has no children in it at all.

I cannot for the life of me see why children have to take so long to grow up. I think they do it on purpose.’

I’m sitting pretty in a nice house with a successful businessman and you’re left slaving away teaching a lot of nasty little children the ABC.’

Looks is more important than books, Miss Hunky …’

You look like someone’s grandmother gone wrong!’

plate piled high with eggs and sausages and bacon

Here I come, the great man himself, the master of the house, the wage-earner, the one who makes it possible for all the rest of you to live so well!

Matilda longed for her parents to be good and loving and understanding and honourable and intelligent.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Gone to Earth by Mary Webb

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Good Companions by J. B. Priestley

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Animal Farm by George Orwell