Is reading the Harry Potter books like taking a run at a brick wall? J. K. Rowling's failure to impress literary critics doesn’t matter. She has created useful spaces and emanations. In her castle-school are many rooms, and in those rooms are many serviceable personas. My children’s generation, with the exception of a few hoity-toity young people, have inhabited Hogwarts. When I was nine in Abingdon I remember visits to libraries in winter, watching Czechoslovakian adaptations of Hans Christian Anderson's Snow Queen and my mother reading ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ to me. The best part of the book is when Lucy has pushed her way through old fur coats (smelling of mothballs) and her feet begin to crunch snow. Fern branches brush against her cheeks and here she is; in a forest clearing at night. And there it is, twenty yards away, a lamp post more ancient and hardier than the iron pillar in the Qutab Minar. With words, C. S. Lewis has sculpted a pure emotional
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head