It’s often forgotten, but Harry Potter grew up on the most English of streets. When we first meet him he lives on Privet Drive, with its “tidy front gardens”, milk bottles outside front doors and spoilt children.
In fact, if Harry hadn’t been a wizard made to sleep in a cupboard by his evil aunt and uncle, you might have said he had a conventional English middle-class upbringing.
The penultimate film in the Harry Potter series is released next week, and it’s another reminder of the UK’s grip on global youth culture. The US is often castigated for cultural imperialism, but Britain is the worse offender. Bizarrely, the drizzly island has colonised the minds of many of the world’s eight- to 25-year-olds. To foreign readers who think I’m a British nationalist, I’m not saying this domination is a good thing. Perhaps it’s a bad thing. The point is that it exists, long after the end of empire, and the question is why.