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
Harry Potter during the rise in the popularity of the Harry Potter books. The research also found that children who read Harry Potter books were not more likely to go on to read outside the fantasy and mystery genres. NEA chairman Dana Gioia said the series, "got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading." Jennifer Conn used Snape's and Quidditch coach Madam Hooch's teaching methods as examples of what to avoid and what to emulate in