J. K. ROWLING has come close to saying that she will kill off Harry Potter, the boy magician who made her a multi-millionaire.

The author said in a televised interview that both she and her daughter were having to resist pressure to reveal the plot of the last book, which will be published next year at the earliest. But she revealed that two principal characters would be sacrificed in the seventh and last book in the series...

Asked whether one of the casualties would be Harry himself, she said that she understood authors such as Agatha Christie killed off their main characters to prevent other writers from hijacking them.

“I can completely understand . . . the mentality of an author who thinks, ‘Well, I’m gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels’.”