SOURCE: “It's Witchcraft,” in National Review, Vol. 51, No. 19, October 11, 1999, p. 60.

In the following review, Stuttaford remarks that Harry Potter follows in the footsteps of the finest of children's stories.

It's enough to make you choke on your fava beans. In bookstore new-fiction aisles, this was meant to be the summer of Hannibal Lecter: aesthete, Renaissance scholar, and serial killer. Instead he has had to share the limelight with Harry Potter, the schoolboy hero of a series of British children's books. The second of these, The Chamber of Secrets, was released in the U.S. at about the same time as Thomas Harris's Hannibal. On September 19, more than three months later, it was Number Three on the New York Times bestseller list, five places ahead of the unfortunate Dr. Lecter. The same week, the first Harry Potter (The Sorcerer's Stone), which has been on the list for the better...