Poor Mojo's Newswire

Only seven copies of the book are being printed, the wire service reported. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children's charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.

Rowling drew the illustrations herself and provided the handwriting for the five stories that make up the collection of fairy tales.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is mentioned in the final Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as a gift left by headmaster Albus Dumbledore to Harry's friend Hermione, which provides clues that help destroy the evil Lord Voldemort.

Rowling outed the headmaster at a sell-out appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York. After a brief reading from the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling took questions from the audience.

When a young fan asked if Dumbledore would find "true love", Rowling answered: "Dumbledore is gay".

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.