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
The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter it was "cool that their hero, Harry, was encountering some of the creatures of mythology." Colbert felt that knowing the origins of Rowling's character and creatures increased "the books' magic tenfold" and made the "Harry Potter" universe seem more lifelike. Feeling that he wanted to share this with others, Colbert spent a year researching the references in the novels and collected his discoveries for a guidebook to the magical world of Harry Potter. Colbert wrote "The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter" while teaching a seminar on self-publishing to graduate students at the University of North Carolina. He had it self-published