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 hold special liturgies every Thursday to cure those afflicted by spells or possessed by evil spirits. Pamphlets were posted throughout the city, claiming that reciting a "Harry Potter" spell "is as if you are praying to evil", and that "God hates magic." However, the Russian Orthodox apologist deacon Andrei Kuraev argued in his 2003 book "Harry Potter in the Church: Between an Anathema and a Smile" that the Harry Potter books are not dangerous. His arguments include the books' similarity with traditional fairy tales and literary classics such as the "Iliad" which no-one calls "Satanic"; the difference between the books'