The Ministry of Magic

The Ministry is the state in these stories. It regulates creatures, games, accidents, and law. It also shows how a bureaucracy can be comic in peacetime and dangerous when frightened people want a simple enemy.

Readers see it through visits: a visitor entrance, an atrium, courtrooms, and offices stacked with paper. The tone shifts across the series from satire of red tape to a portrait of a captured institution. That shift is one of the political arguments of the later books, stated here only in outline.

This entry does not walk a plot. It names the kind of power the building holds.