The most interesting part was the way that Harry’s initiation into this magical society was, for me, a metaphor for growing up; and because the world was all strange and new for us too, it was a reminder of what that had been like. At first the magic world was wonderful and everything exciting, an escape from his dreary and disappointing (and abusive) real-world existence, but slowly Harry (and we) discovered that this world wasn’t perfect either, that it had not just the odd person who was mean, but the system itself was fundamentally flawed and the ‘adults’ were capable of deluding themselves into justifying their bad choices, and even the good guys weren’t always able to save the day. I found that arc interesting.

Of course it has to be more than one point to remain worth reading over a 7-book series, and I certainly hope Rowling has found (or is listening to!) an editor to finish the series off well.

Lactantius had been able to bring nothing with him save his own manuscripts and was thus left, with all his unrivalled powers of expression, rather vague about what to express; with, more than that, the ever-present fear of falling into error. He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.

Evelyn Waugh, Helena, chapter 6, Penguin edition (1963), p. 79.