Planet Potter

Another day, another set of Harry Potter facts and figures… Today they come from Amazon, and the internet giant tells us that pre-orders for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince have been received from 90 countries worldwide - from Albania to Zambia. There are apparently, Potter fans as far afield as Cambodia, Ecuador, Guadaloupe, Peru, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and – surely not – Vatican City. Could Pope Benedict XVI be a secret fan? We know that the Vatican has "no problems" with the boy wizard and a Catholic official has declared that JK Rowling is "Christian by conviction, is Christian in her mode of living, even in her way of writing". If the pontiff has succumbed, his copy is just one of 1.4m copies of the UK and US edition that have been pre-ordered on the bookseller's sites to date.