Speaker – Nigel Newton CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, LONDON<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Harry Potter books have been translated into some 75 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies. Nigel Newton owes the inspiration to publish the first in the series to his young daughter, who read the manuscript and insisted that it was \u2018much better than anything else.\u2019 He initially sent J. K. Rowling a check for \u00a32,500. The novels tell coming-of-age stories fantastically yet also realistically, setting them in a world of wizardry, spells, and quidditch as well as homework, adolescent crushes, and cruel elders. Yet not all the grownups are malign: Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizards\u2019 school Hogwarts, according to Rowling herself, \u2018is the epitome of goodness.\u2019 What are Nigel Newton\u2019s own impressions of the characters\u2014and, in his view, the reasons for the success of the series? Nigel Newton is an American-born British publisher originally from San Francisco. He studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He then stayed on in England, learning the book trade first at Macmillan and then at Sidgwick and Jackson, where he became deputy managing director at age 27. He first thought of creating a new company in 1984, and launched Bloomsbury two years later. The firm quickly became prosperous, and its success was ensured when it published J. K. Rowling. Is there a future for Bloomsbury after Harry Potter? \u2018You can bet your Hogwarts there is\u2019\u2014especially since I. B. Tauris has now merged with Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Nigel Newton CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, LONDON The Harry Potter books have been translated into some 75 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies. Nigel Newton owes the inspiration to publish the first in the series to his young daughter, who read the manuscript and insisted that it was \u2018much better […]","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/02\/BSLS-18-11-16.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"45.8M","filesize_raw":"48027008","date_recorded":"16-11-2018","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[85,89,53,40,92,46,95,86,93,94,87,81,88,90,91],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-95","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-bloomsbury","6":"tag-bloomsbury-publishing","7":"tag-british-studies","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-cambridge","10":"tag-dr-roger-louis","11":"tag-dumbledore","12":"tag-harry-potter","13":"tag-hogwarts","14":"tag-i-b-tauris","15":"tag-j-k-rowling","16":"tag-london","17":"tag-nigel-newton","18":"tag-quidditch","19":"tag-selwyn-college","20":"series-bsls","21":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":865,"post_author":"40","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:49:48","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:49:48","post_content":"\n Nigel Newton is an American-born British publisher originally from San Francisco. He studied English at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He then stayed on in England, learning the book trade first at Macmillan and then at Sidgwick and Jackson, where he became deputy managing director at age 27. He first thought of creating a new company in 1984, and launched Bloomsbury two years later. The firm quickly became prosperous, and its success was ensured when it published J. K. Rowling. Is there a future for Bloomsbury after Harry Potter? \u2018You can bet your Hogwarts there is\u2019\u2014especially since I. B. Tauris has now merged with Bloomsbury.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Nigel Newton","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"nigel-newton","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:49:48","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:49:48","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=865","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" We’re very glad to see that there are so many Harry Potter readers enthusiasts.<\/p>\n We’re also very glad that the the dean of liberal arts is with us here this afternoon.<\/p>\n And Randi, it’s very good of you to to come. And I will<\/p>\n introduce our participants and read the reverse order, beginning with Susan Napier.<\/p>\n We’re very glad to have Susan back. She used to teach at the University of Texas. Susan<\/p>\n was one that got us into Harry Potter in the first place. In fact, I’m not sure<\/p>\n that I would have read Harry Potter had it not been for not been for Susan.<\/p>\n We want to also introduce another publishing<\/p>\n panjandrums. This is Roz Vasic Ardy, who is the publisher<\/p>\n at Tourists and it’s Saraj. And I hope after reading<\/p>\n this list that everyone will break out in wild applause because<\/p>\n Iraj is the publisher of Adventures with Brittania, more adventurous with Britannia.<\/p>\n I’m not there yet. Still more adventurous yet. More adventures, penultimate adventures.<\/p>\n Ultimate adventures, resurgent adventures, irrepressible adventures, resplendent<\/p>\n adventures and effervescent adventures.<\/p>\n This brings us snick down to the next volume and we already have a suggestion.<\/p>\n Serendipitous part of you.<\/p>\n Oh, oh, what about magical? And magical is another<\/p>\n possibility. Rush will let you think about this. We are extraordinarily pleased<\/p>\n that Nigel Newton would come to all the way from London to speak to us<\/p>\n this afternoon about Harry Potter in the context of<\/p>\n Bloomsbury Publishing. This is a remarkable publishing firm itself.<\/p>\n Some of you will have heard yesterday afternoon a little bit about the history of the<\/p>\n Bloomsbury this afternoon. It’s a little bit more specific. Perhaps the reason<\/p>\n why Bloomsbury is most famous at all. This is a Nigel Newton<\/p>\n on Harry Potter.<\/p>\n Well, good afternoon. And a very warm welcome<\/p>\n to all of you. As you can see, we we love all of<\/p>\n our children equally. Every every house is<\/p>\n represented in my scarf. So this<\/p>\n is the story of the creation of a leading<\/p>\n global piece of publishing.<\/p>\n And so has it’s the inside story.<\/p>\n May I have your permission that nothing I say will appear on social<\/p>\n media or any other form of repetition?<\/p>\n Is that OK with everyone? Thank you. Harry Potter<\/p>\n stories have a tendency to get taken up, and I had the<\/p>\n misfortune once of being persuaded by my colleagues in Australia<\/p>\n to do an interview on the radio. And I thought, well,<\/p>\n I really don’t want to do that. I never kind of saw that sort of publicity.<\/p>\n But they said, come on, it’s just Brisbane. And I thought, well, OK,<\/p>\n I can talk there, nothing will happen. And I told<\/p>\n the story of how I received a phone call on about the sixth<\/p>\n Harry Potter book from GC HQ, which is<\/p>\n British Secret Intelligence. It’s our equivalent of the National<\/p>\n Security Agency. So they’re the people who who listen<\/p>\n listen to everything, including this. And.<\/p>\n And they rang up and said this was D-Day minus about six<\/p>\n days. And we kept these books very strictly embargoed us,<\/p>\n as you all know. And they said we’ve detected the complete text<\/p>\n of the next Harry Potter on the Internet. And I thought, oh, my goodness.<\/p>\n Aside from being surprised to receive a phone call from government communications headquarters<\/p>\n and indeed their helpful attitude. So I got our edits her<\/p>\n down and we he read out a bit and we thought, thank goodness it was a fabrication<\/p>\n because as I’m sure you know, people wrote entire books of their version of what<\/p>\n the next Harry Potter would be in several of them. It was quite extraordinary.<\/p>\n So Harry Potter was was being protected<\/p>\n by the Secret Service. This was pretty good. So I told that story. And<\/p>\n to my horror, the next week it was on the front page of The<\/p>\n Sunday Times in London. And so some stringer in in<\/p>\n Brisbane picked it up and kind of sold the story on. And I was deeply embarrassed<\/p>\n because it hadn’t been my intention to exploit that story<\/p>\n in the home market, as it were. So that’s why you may not you may<\/p>\n not say anything to anyone and make me regret these stories.<\/p>\n So what is most startling, considering the heights of Potter mania<\/p>\n today, is quite how ordinary<\/p>\n its arrival and reception was since it began<\/p>\n its life. I introduced Star Children’s Editor, who was<\/p>\n a brilliant man, is a brilliant man called Barry Cunningham to<\/p>\n the literary agent Christopher Liddle, the wonderfully named Christopher Little who.<\/p>\n So The Legend Goes was picked by Joe Rolling, flipping<\/p>\n through the Writers and Artists Yearbook, which is a guidebook to literary<\/p>\n agents, amongst other things. And the story goes<\/p>\n that she was taken by his name, Christopher Little Christopher Robin. It sounds<\/p>\n sounds like a sort of man for a children’s book. And he<\/p>\n sent this book in. We were sent the chapters that<\/p>\n leads to up to Diagon Ali, as I recall. I’m just going<\/p>\n to try the studio and am I in the way<\/p>\n of my own songs. And they we we couldn’t afford<\/p>\n chairs in those days. We were the children’s bits was at the top of the 20th Century<\/p>\n Fox building in Soho Square in London. So the four of. We’re sitting on bean bags<\/p>\n and they handed just the one type script, handed<\/p>\n the pages around to each other as each finished the page and they became<\/p>\n incredibly excited as they read this book.<\/p>\n And so they were they decided to submit it to our editorial meeting<\/p>\n and they were trying to send a signal that it would win the Booker Prize of<\/p>\n publishing, which is of children’s publishing, which is called the Smartest Prize<\/p>\n and Smarties. If you don’t know or like Eminem’s a little hard shell,<\/p>\n coded bits of chocolate and they sponsor this this children’s<\/p>\n literary prize. So they rolled the manuscript up,<\/p>\n typescript up like glass sellotape to one end, scotch taped one end<\/p>\n and filled the middle with smarties and then itafter and put<\/p>\n a ribbon on it. So I was sent home. I chaired the editorial committee meeting<\/p>\n us the next day and I had this thing I was supposed to read, but I think I couldn’t be bothered. So<\/p>\n I handed it to my 8 year old daughter Alice, who is now<\/p>\n time later on a kind of a high saying,<\/p>\n Dad, you’ve never published anything this good before and and wrote<\/p>\n that. That was quite awkward to explain to some of our other authors. And she wrote me<\/p>\n this note, which if you can’t read it, says, The excitements<\/p>\n in this book made me feel warm inside. I think it is possibly one of the<\/p>\n best books in eight slash nine year old could read.<\/p>\n So the next day, BARRIE and everyone else in the room who had read<\/p>\n it asked me to authorize an advance of one and a half thousand pounds<\/p>\n for the rights. And I said, well, you know, Alice likes it. And<\/p>\n I did. And in fact, her agent played hardball and<\/p>\n pushed us up to two and a half thousand pounds. So we got it. Now, what we didn’t<\/p>\n know at the time was that ace competitor or as or I’ve even read<\/p>\n in in a tweet, I think from the author that it was 12 competitors of<\/p>\n ours had turned down Harry Potter. So we were in blissful ignorance<\/p>\n of that fact. So really, our only claim to fame is that we were<\/p>\n the ones who didn’t say no. So thank God for that. You remember<\/p>\n the EMI turned down the Beatles. So I’m sure there’s nothing<\/p>\n shameful in our 12 competitors. But I mean, what a load of idiots.<\/p>\n How could you hit<\/p>\n who in this room didn’t get it immediately so<\/p>\n that this was at the time when email was invented and we all had pieces<\/p>\n sitting on our desks for the first time, or some of us and our children’s<\/p>\n marketing manager, who I’m afraid is a bit blurry here. Rosalind Walker<\/p>\n emailed us this new fangled technology every day saying, I know you think<\/p>\n Harry Potter is good, but you don’t understand. It’s really, really, really good. We just<\/p>\n thought, oh, god, why? Why does she go on? And in order to demonstrate<\/p>\n that, we we did know it was really, really good, that we never dreamt it would sell,<\/p>\n you know, probably 50000, let alone 500 million. This was a letter written in<\/p>\n March 1997. So three months before<\/p>\n the book came out on whenever it was June twenty sixth to the literary<\/p>\n reviewer of children’s books for The Sunday Times, telling them what a<\/p>\n remarkable book it was. So we we knew that it was good. We just didn’t know<\/p>\n it was big. And one of our leading bookshops changed to the time articles<\/p>\n were persuaded to put the book in their windows.<\/p>\n And I think our initial print run was 700 hardbacks and two and a half thousand<\/p>\n paperbacks. Now, there was a story there, which is that the<\/p>\n first print run had a major error in it.<\/p>\n And so the books had to be junked. And so we did what the British<\/p>\n have always done in such situations and sent them to Australia<\/p>\n with prisoners and unworn. Things so Australia<\/p>\n is the home of the most valuable first print run in the world, and having<\/p>\n those errors makes them identifiable to second<\/p>\n hand booksellers who know what to look for. But this did start<\/p>\n to take off. It really took off not due<\/p>\n to anything we did, but due to the first children who read it<\/p>\n told other children about it. Playground marketing, if you want to give<\/p>\n it a name. And so it was the brilliance of the text itself and<\/p>\n not the marketing, but it got to about 30000 copies by<\/p>\n Christmas following that June launch. And nothing can ever<\/p>\n compete with the power of word of mouth. And it did win<\/p>\n the Smarties prize. So my colleagues were ipsc. Right? In fact, it it kept every<\/p>\n time the new book came out that kept winning the Smarties Prize. It finally got embarrassing<\/p>\n and we stopped submitting them to give other people a chance.<\/p>\n J.K. Rowling did her first literary events in at Edinburgh<\/p>\n in August nineteen ninety seven. Just a few weeks after publication<\/p>\n in the TV there and about 20 children appeared, the early adopters<\/p>\n contrasting with the tens of thousands who would appear at theNSW in later<\/p>\n years. Now let me find another slide.<\/p>\n This was a van we rented to tell people.<\/p>\n Actually, it’s a book ahead that ask A to drive around London<\/p>\n spreading the news. See<\/p>\n my daughter as the early adopter. And she was the<\/p>\n children’s library assistant, probably aged about nine now, and invited<\/p>\n Joe Rowing to come and speak at her school, Putney High School in London. And she did<\/p>\n a deal was done with Scholastic, the great American publisher, Harry<\/p>\n Potter. And as you know, they published it a year later<\/p>\n and under the title of the the Sorcerer’s Stone. I think later<\/p>\n on there was some feeling in America that the adaptations<\/p>\n of certain words that would happen in the normal process<\/p>\n of trans-Atlantic editing was inappropriate. And I think<\/p>\n Jurisich started being called jerseys again instead of sweaters or whatever.<\/p>\n It was being changed, too. So the first big press<\/p>\n launch came along, I think, with the paperback of the Chamber of Secrets.<\/p>\n And it’s notoriously hard to get press coverage for a paperback launch<\/p>\n because that’s coming many months after the hardcover.<\/p>\n But we did we had an events, obviously at platform nine and three quarters at King’s<\/p>\n Cross Station, which we had two events in the great children’s television program.<\/p>\n Blue Peter came and filmed that. And there<\/p>\n was a Hogwarts steam engine, pumpkin soup. Dumbledore<\/p>\n was presence and a nationwide tour, culminating with 800<\/p>\n children coming in Manchester to an event which was a record<\/p>\n at the time. Now, one of the really exciting moments<\/p>\n was the The Prisoner of Azkaban.<\/p>\n And and we did have a really great idea then. Sorry, I got over there right<\/p>\n there. You can see which is there were stories<\/p>\n that children were playing truant from school on the day a new Harry Potter<\/p>\n would come out. So we decided to launch the book at 3:45<\/p>\n p.m. so they could come after school. And booksellers were just completely<\/p>\n stupefied at 3:45 p.m. But they obeyed<\/p>\n and. And we knew we’d really made it big. When The Daily Telegraph<\/p>\n the next day ran a photograph on the front page of a very long line of children<\/p>\n outside the Lion and Unicorn Bookshop, a small bookshop in Richmond<\/p>\n to the west of London. And suddenly we were big news. It may<\/p>\n in fact, it made the news on television. BBC One, ITV, Channel 4.<\/p>\n And it doesn’t seem remarkable now, but it seemed very remarkable at the time that<\/p>\n we beat the record of Hannibal. The novel by Thomas Harris out a month<\/p>\n previously, which sold 54000 copies in week one<\/p>\n and ASKEDand sold 64000 in the first two and a half days.<\/p>\n So this was the press loved it. Their headline was Hannibal Eaten for Breakfast<\/p>\n by 30.<\/p>\n So Harry Potter this moments reclaims the supremacy<\/p>\n of the book over the Gameboy, which was the phenomenon of its time<\/p>\n and effectively made reading cool again, and especially for boys<\/p>\n who who stopped regarding it as the province of their sister<\/p>\n if they had one. And this has driven a huge increase in reading by<\/p>\n children and may even have a ripple effect to this day.<\/p>\n So one of the great excitements came<\/p>\n next with the publication of the Goblet of Fire, and by then<\/p>\n the press were all over us. Harry Potter is such a big phenomenon<\/p>\n that our trash was being searched for details of when the next book<\/p>\n would come out. And there were real problems.<\/p>\n I think I’m gonna mean who who wears a scarf indoors anyway.<\/p>\n There’s a real problem with people, the press in particular, trying to find<\/p>\n out the plot before the books came out. So we we had<\/p>\n huge secrecy. We didn’t produce any more<\/p>\n advance proof copies. We placed all the ads without<\/p>\n even the title being known. What the title was was a big secret.<\/p>\n Rolling held an international press conference in April that year and gave away just three<\/p>\n details about HP for us. It was known<\/p>\n that just created a feeding frenzy of anticipation. We kept the<\/p>\n manuscript in a bank vault and that was really for real.<\/p>\n You know, we had breakdowns and everything. In fact, we we only allowed four people<\/p>\n in our own company to read it prior to publication on a need to know basis.<\/p>\n The editors and the production people. So<\/p>\n the great fun came with the launch of that book. When we did the Hogwarts tour<\/p>\n and we really went for this full on. So I put together a steam train.<\/p>\n I borrowed this beautiful locomotive from someone, commissioned<\/p>\n this sign, which I still have sitting at home and then<\/p>\n tried to put together a basically a sort of Edwardian train borrowing cars<\/p>\n from different people. This is the dining car.<\/p>\n We were on the road for probably three or four, five days. There<\/p>\n is Joe, that is my<\/p>\n son, William. I thought I’d take the whole family. That<\/p>\n obscure head at the back is me. And these are that’s<\/p>\n Rosalind Walker and I Matthewson, who is the editor,<\/p>\n the brilliant editor of the Harry Potter books. So it was<\/p>\n unbelievable fun we we set out on this train. It’s quite<\/p>\n difficult taking a steam train around because you have to fit on the tracks between these very<\/p>\n fast intercity trains and not get run over. So it’s it’s a real<\/p>\n art. And we went to Didcot, which some of you may know<\/p>\n as a station on the way to Oxford. And at each station,<\/p>\n a thousand children had won free tickets to be the people who could<\/p>\n go on the train and get their books signed. And very topically, for<\/p>\n the events of last week, the car that I borrowed for<\/p>\n the actual signings was a kind of Edwardian library car. And it was<\/p>\n the train car on which the armistice at the end<\/p>\n of World War One in the field, the forest of calm that we’ve all been seeing pictures<\/p>\n of in the last week was their car. So the kids<\/p>\n would come in at one door, walk down to that big desk where<\/p>\n General Fourche and signed the disastrous.<\/p>\n Justice or that led to the disastrous feticide treaty, so it’s<\/p>\n quite a historic carriage, and then they would get off at the other end and we proceeded<\/p>\n around the country. We went. Eventually, I think through<\/p>\n Kru, we went to York, we went to Perth and Scotland<\/p>\n and every step of the way there were a thousand children<\/p>\n waiting once when we were in the middle of the countryside. There were<\/p>\n about 50 people at the very place where we had<\/p>\n to stop to put water into the steam engine. That’s how they work.<\/p>\n And and and we thought, how did these people know we’d be right here<\/p>\n in the middle of nowhere? And the locomotive driver explained, and<\/p>\n they have no idea who you are and don’t care. They’re train spotters. And they<\/p>\n heard there was a steam train, so they came to write it down 3 4<\/p>\n to show you shouldn’t always assume you’re the center of events. So we were<\/p>\n front page news for every day for four days on the train and sold<\/p>\n three hundred and seventy two thousand on the train in the<\/p>\n first day. So. And so you would go from this mayhem on<\/p>\n these platforms. And then when the train would pull out, you just have sudden peace<\/p>\n again. And a man appeared with a glass of champagne. There were just<\/p>\n about well, there you see all the people who are on the train. And we had sleeping carriages<\/p>\n and it was we were very independent. So<\/p>\n what’s next? So this is the order of the Phenix.<\/p>\n So the way I found out, because I never would really know,<\/p>\n nor did my colleagues when the next book was going to be finished.<\/p>\n And part of the thing about being a publisher is you don’t press an author<\/p>\n saying, you know, when is it going to be when you don’t want to put pressure? So you never ask an author<\/p>\n when their next book will come. But one day at<\/p>\n my desk, I got a phone call from Christopher Liddle and he said, Nigel,<\/p>\n can I meet you at the Pelican pub? And I said, Yes, sure.<\/p>\n Did you say the Pelican? And that was the place where we would meet for these<\/p>\n handovers of the manuscript. So I turned to jelly, rushed and got in my car and<\/p>\n drove out to the pelican. And he was there with two pints set up at the bar and<\/p>\n a innocuous Sainsbury’s supermarket carrier bag sitting<\/p>\n on his feet. And he<\/p>\n said, We never discussed the bag at all.<\/p>\n We just had our drinks, chatted about the weather, as one does. But but when<\/p>\n I left, I left carrying the same streets bag. So it’s a classic dead drop.<\/p>\n I’d read by John McKerrow. I knew how to do this.<\/p>\n And so then we had a promotion of the book. We took over the<\/p>\n Albert Hall, four and a half thousand people sess and we<\/p>\n invited children for free. But on a kind of ticketed basis from all over<\/p>\n the country, trying to represent all regions and all different types<\/p>\n of everything. And it was really great. And I think Stephen Fry<\/p>\n interviewed her on the stage about that time.<\/p>\n The British Booksellers Association had its annual conference in<\/p>\n Brighton, and I was just down the coast near summer called Seaford in<\/p>\n Sussex. And Joe ruling came and also Michael<\/p>\n Ondaatje, she. And that, believe it or not, is me sitting on the right.<\/p>\n And so that was a very exciting launch.<\/p>\n J.K. Robing, the most talented person I know, brilliance, intelligence,<\/p>\n funny, astonishing, hardworking sense of humor, fun. It was<\/p>\n these were very exciting times. So<\/p>\n what I was going to try to dwell on next.<\/p>\n This was a launch we had at Edinburgh Castle and<\/p>\n it was a kind of song Ague Mayor Offact with. Images of Harry being<\/p>\n flashed up onto the walls of the castle.<\/p>\n I was going to reflect on some of the qualities<\/p>\n of the book, as Roger asked me to<\/p>\n do so when he invited me to speak to you today.<\/p>\n And I think part of why it’s endured is the emphasis<\/p>\n on human qualities in Harry Potter. And<\/p>\n on the other hand, the accentuation of your qualities as an individual<\/p>\n resourcefulness, intelligence and its more importance,<\/p>\n bedfellow, common sense and most importantly, self-reliance.<\/p>\n At the end of the day, it’s you who takes on the world and not the team. And it’s Harry<\/p>\n alone who controls his destiny, not his group of friends, as he squares<\/p>\n up to Lord Voldemort, camaraderie and friendship, or nevertheless,<\/p>\n the qualities that underpin the world of Hogwarts and<\/p>\n the intense friendships that are formed at school. The<\/p>\n psychological foundation of Harry’s existence is his love.<\/p>\n The love that his dead parents hold for him, the love that sustains<\/p>\n him through his life and giving him the strength to win his battles.<\/p>\n But life at Hogwarts is about fun and circumstance and wits<\/p>\n and humor and practical jokes as well.<\/p>\n So we can just remember that we can all be Harry.<\/p>\n If we believe in magic or God or in our<\/p>\n personal battles of good versus evil. But if we can’t<\/p>\n be Harry, then we can be his store friends Ron and her miney<\/p>\n always at his side, and they are pretty good and pretty admirable too.<\/p>\n The characters are are so powerful<\/p>\n in these books without Ron and her miney is Harry fully<\/p>\n Harry. Every reader projects themself or every child onto<\/p>\n one of them, and we truly can’t bear the thoughts of the possibility of<\/p>\n any of them dying. And it’s such a relief that J.K. Rowling,<\/p>\n who does dispatch beloved characters without fear assessment,<\/p>\n also allows them all to survive. They are the heart of the stories.<\/p>\n There are routes into this amazing world and their journey<\/p>\n is our journey. So if.<\/p>\n If you like. I think one of the things that we<\/p>\n could dwell on is the fact<\/p>\n that the position that we find ourselves in 21 years later,<\/p>\n so 21 years have flashed by and the whole or<\/p>\n is it 20 to 21 from the UK publication. So it’s only with time<\/p>\n that we can begin to understand its true<\/p>\n scope and breadth, breadth and its openness to appreciation. Time<\/p>\n and again, new generations are discovering the books the whole<\/p>\n time. The I think in in Britain alone there<\/p>\n are 700000 new 8 year olds every year. A remarkable<\/p>\n statistic I mugged up on. And so the kids who are<\/p>\n reading these books today are the are the children of the early<\/p>\n readers who who like all classics, mothers<\/p>\n and fathers, want to pass on to their their kids. Whether it’s<\/p>\n C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien or a male on the<\/p>\n enthusiasms, the books that comforted and enthralled them in their own childhoods.<\/p>\n And so the phenomenon seems to to actually be be growing. 21 years<\/p>\n later, we seem to be selling more<\/p>\n books than ever. And and aided by<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/95\/bloomsbury-and-harry-potter.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/95\/bloomsbury-and-harry-potter.mp3","audio_player":"