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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Sorting Hat is notorious for refusing to admit it has made a mistake in its sorting of a student.
Of Harry Potter’s contemporaries, Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom came closest to being Hatstalls.
In Neville’s case, the Hat was determined to place him in Gryffindor: Neville, intimidated by that house’s reputation for bravery, requested a placing in Hufflepuff.
The barrel two from the bottom, middle of the second row, will open if tapped in the rhythm of ‘Helga Hufflepuff’.
The magic used in the map’s creation is advanced and impressive; it includes the Homonculous Charm, enabling the possessor of the map to track the movements of every person in the castle, and it was also enchanted to forever repel (as insultingly as possible) the curiosity of their nemesis, Severus Snape.
In the original draft of Chamber of Secrets, I had Harry and Ron crash into the lake in Mr Weasley’s Ford Anglia, and meet the merpeople there for the first time.
This is just one example of the ways in which, when writing fantasy novels, one must be careful what one invents. For every benefit, there is usually a drawback.
Elderly witches and wizards still use the saying ‘I’ll take Cadogan’s pony’ to mean, ‘I’ll salvage the best I can from a tricky situation’.
