J.K. Rowling's powerful Brexit parting words: 'I really don't want to lose my homeland'

LONDON - In the early 1990s, a young British night-school tutor was living in the shabby-romantic northern Portuguese city of Porto, treading cobbled alleyways, ascending the well-worn staircase of a magnificent neo-Gothic bookstore and catching flyaway glimpses of black-caped schoolchildren. Some of those arresting images found their way into the fictional realm she went on to create: the Harry Potter series, the beloved worldwide blockbuster about a boy magician and his friends.

Last month, as a now-missed Brexit deadline was bearing down, J.K. Rowling and nine other British literary luminaries, academics and artists published a batch of elegiac love letters to a continental Europe that