Search Results

“... success of a first novel – though it might simply be that those cases are more prominent. (J.K. Rowling, suffering from the much rarer condition of Fifth Novel Anxiety Syndrome, seems to have got the message, and has applied for planning permission to add a little room to her large house in Edinburgh to help her rediscover the magic.) The first novels you ...”

“... Hitchens, Norris McWhirter, mad Patrick Moore – includes the name of the universally adored J.K. Rowling OBE. Is this not taking the antique Englishness of Harry Potter just a little too far? But then I remember that the ‘feasts’ served up at Hogwarts boarding school are of ‘roast beef, roast chicken . . . lamb chops . . . Yorkshire puddings ...”

“... category; Jamie Oliver was best for Home and Leisure and Simon Schama for General Knowledge; J.K. Rowling wrote the best children’s book and Maeve Binchy’s Scarlet Feather won the Fiction Award. These results, of course, could have been predicted with a fair degree of accuracy by anyone casting their eye over the bestseller lists, which is hardly ...”

“... It seems eccentric​ to say it of a person richer than the queen, but J.K. Rowling is, I think, undervalued. Or rather, she gets credit for the less important things, for being a marketing phenomenon whose books have sold more than 400 million copies, and not for the painstaking intricacy of the texts themselves ...”

“... parents, and part of it (the rags-to-riches, Cinderella part) shapes the real-life story of J.K. Rowling, who rose out of obscurity and deprivation to claim her literary sovereignty. Rowling has been praised for what Lurie and others regard as a particularly British talent for writing for children, but the story she tells ...”

“... a certain kind anyway, than ‘No. 1 at a quiet time of year’. I say P.D. James rather than J.K. Rowling because the precocious Potter has been banned from ‘fiction’ for being both underage and too successful, although I’d have thought ‘The No.5 Bestseller after Harrys Potter 1-4’ would still cut the mustard. ...”

“... The Casual Vacancy is as much an event as a novel – J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults! – but only the novel aspect can be reviewed. Incidental atmospherics don’t come into it – an astronomer trying to establish the composition of a comet will try to look beyond the streak it makes in the sky. On one level, nothing could be more natural than that a successful writer should try something new ...”

“... have continued to have their fans. Unicorns are pervasive in modern fantasy and J.K. Rowling has made good use of ‘fantastic beasts’, basilisks, centaurs and hippogriffs. In T.H. White’s The Witch in the Wood, the second book in his Arthurian series, Sir Palomides and Sir Grummore read a book with ‘pictures on almost every page. They were ...”

“... human nature) and derision (gay trauma porn by a straight woman) on both Twitter and BookTok. J.K. Rowling is ‘she who must not be named’. The phrase ‘separate the art from the artist’ comes up regularly in the comments, usually to be dismissed by another commenter: ‘It’s amazing how people don’t realise that buying the books supports the ...”

“... has lived a life in many ways more like a writer’s than a modern pop star’s: pop’s own J.K. Rowling. (With her Roman Catholic background and taste for bittersweet mysticism, other names suggest themselves here too: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon.) She slowly assumed the status of national treasure, despite or maybe ...”

“... at moron executives bonding through paintballing … look at them unabashedly reading J.K. Rowling’), isn’t an option, and yet he accepts that childhood ‘tugs at our sleeve all our life’ and is therefore a worthy subject. The approach he settled on is neither misery nor nostalgia but ‘the recall of childhood from a distance – as though ...”

“... he ‘ne wol doon hem but dishonour’: all he will do is dishonour them (sexually). The Wife’s joke tells us a few things. One is that in Chaucer’s late medieval milieu at least – educated, metropolitan, sceptical – belief in fairies was a thing of the past. Chaucer mentions fairies several times, in several tales, but never takes them ...”

“... house publication of the Scottish political class. It has earned praise from Nicola Sturgeon, J.K. Rowling and Irvine Welsh, the latter two providing glowing quotes for the book’s cover, and has received positive reviews. It’s worth noting that one element of his critique which hasn’t been embraced concerns class: the journalist Dani Garavelli argued in ...”

“... into a sanctuary of rather more traditional design to place a call to the Ministry of Magic. J.K. Rowling has enough respect for folk memory to register his surprise that the phone actually works. A lot depends on genre. ‘Don’t go there,’ would be sound advice to characters in most kinds of Hollywood movie. They invariably do. Why, when Hitchcock’s ...”

“... There were school corridors, and those polished shields on the wall that say things like ‘J.K. Rowling, Cantab 1963’. There was a smell of school, residual – polish and feet. But there were no signs of actual, present-day pupils. Perhaps they had all fled into the hills, and left it to the Book Group. Despite the rain, they had come out in heroic ...”