Harry Potter emerged into cinemas as we were still all stunned by 9/11, but yet to see the retaliatory “war on terror”. It’s amazing and poignant to remember the sheer excitement of that HPATPS premiere in November 2001: I myself called it an “old-fashioned pre-September 11 news event”. The Harry Potter franchise itself is still a colossal commercial entity, an IP Shangri La, although its creator JK Rowling is now at the centre of an acrimonious gender politics debate – undreamed of in 2001 – and the world of children’s and YA fiction, which she almost singlehandedly revived all over the world, is strongly policed on just these issues. Sadly, the actors who played the original Dumbledore, Snape, Uncle Vernon and Mr Ollivander – Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Richard Griffiths and John Hurt – are no longer with us. T he very first Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or “Sorcerer’s Stone” for its release in the United States, where audiences were assumed to be unfamiliar with this alchemical term) is now re-released after 20 years, into a rather different world.

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