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 mind that "Harry Potter" is evil before they read. They have taken a magnifying glass and picked at the books, using literary reductionism to find what they want to find. You can pick up Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and do the same thing that these people have done with "Harry Potter"; it is ridiculous." In 2001, Massimo Introvigne, an Italian expert in emerging religious movements, criticised the Fundamentalist impulse to distrust fantasy. "Fundamentalists reject, or even burn, all products of contemporary popular culture, because their modes of production, languages and styles are not intrinsically Christian [...] Most children understand that