Politics of Harry Potter middle class, especially whenever Harry confronts his ludicrously dysfunctional and downright abusive adopted family, the Dursleys." The critic Anthony Holden wrote in "The Observer" on his experience of judging "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" for the 1999 Whitbread Awards. His overall view of the series was very negative—"the Potter saga was essentially patronising, very conservative, highly derivative, dispiritingly nostalgic for a bygone Britain." A review in "The Guardian" echoed this interpretation and stated that "despite all of the books' gestures to multiculturalism and gender equality, Harry Potter is a conservative; a paternalistic, One-Nation Tory, perhaps, but a Tory
Religious debates over the Harry Potter series Religious debates over the Harry Potter series Religious debates over the "Harry Potter" series of books by J. K. Rowling are based on claims that the novels contain occult or Satanic subtexts. A number of Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians have argued against the series, as have some Shia and Sunni Muslims. Supporters of the series have said that the magic in "Harry Potter" bears little resemblance to occultism, being more in the vein of fairy tales such as "Cinderella" and "Snow White", or to the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, both of whom are