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 In 2002, Chick Publications produced a comic book tract titled "The Nervous Witch" that declared "the Potter books open a doorway that will put untold millions of kids into hell." In 2007 Jacqui Komschlies wrote an article in "Christianity Today" comparing "Harry Potter" to "rat poison mixed with orange soda," and said, "We're taking something deadly from our world and turning it into what some are calling 'merely a literary device. A common belief among fundamentalist Christians is that "Harry Potter" promotes the religion of Wicca, and so keeping the books in public schools violates the separation of church and