I was glad to see your thoughts about it “not taking as long as expected” – that caused a lot of questions in my mind too!

I think JK putting in little details about Ginny swishing her long red hair is just another hint – the readers begin to notice her more just as Harry is starting to notice her more. We can complain that we didn’t pick up on Harry’s blossoming feelings, but he was just as clueless – sometimes you don’t realize you’re falling in love until you are deep in it.

Sorry, John, I have to disagree again. Hermione just had to tell Hagrid what had happened to Buckbeak, so it isn’t surprising that Hagrid knew about one student using a time turner, and this doesn’t imply that Hagrid knew about other students using time turners and that this was a fairly commonplace solution (to a not very commonplace problem).

“We couldn’t have done,” said Hermione. “We smashed the entire stock of Ministry Time-Turners when we were there last summer. It was in the Daily Prophet.”

“Ar, well then,” said Hagrid. “There’s no way yeh could’ve done it…”

To me, this confirmed that it was (and, with the one known exception in Hermione’s third year, probably always had been) impossible to find a time turner outside of the DOM. Why else would Hagrid give in so fast?

British readers tell us that it is unusual, but not impossible, to study twelve topics in british Muggle schools (I’m sure you know the essay on Steve’s lexicon). So there is no reason to assume that students would need a time turner to get twelve O.W.L.s, there is no indication that other students ever used a time turner, JKR carefully avoided to tell us how many topics can be studied at Hogwarts or were studied by Hermione (obviously she couldn’t come up with something else that would sound plausible, but she never said that our list of twelve known topics is complete). All this doesn’t make much sense if Hermione didn’t try to do something unique and impossible: study more than twelve topics. And than there is this miraculous scene at the last day of the O.W.L.s:

Their final exam, History of Magic, was not to take place until that afternoon. Harry would very much have liked to go back to bed after breakfast, but he had been counting on the morning for a spot of last-minute revision, so instead he sat with his head in his hands by the common-room window, trying hard not to doze off as he read through some of the three-and-a-half-feet-high stack of notes that Hermione had lent him.

Ron probably slept long (last night had been astronomy examinations), but this would be out of character for Hermione. Shouldn’t she be there with Harry, because she would need her notes to prepare for the final exam? Where is Hermione, if she isn’t sitting an examination for her “unknown topic”?

Some readers are confused by not knowing all of Hermione’s topics, but changing her number of O.W.L.s to ten doesn’t really solve the problem, because this would demand for accomodations and stretches at least in PoA and OotP. So I’m glad to own the old editions of the books, and in my imagination, Harry didn’t dare to ask what Hermione’s eleventh O.W.L. is about, because it would be too embarassing to admit that he still couldn’t figure this out. But since Lilly’s “brand new decoration copy” (December 2009) still doesn’t have the new mistake, maybe sombody came to reason and this change was only announced, but never performed?

Oh, BTW, why would anybody let Hermione have a time turner if this wasn’t a commonplace solution? Maybe to teach her a special lesson nobody else needed to learn: It’s impossible to learn everything even if you can travel back in time to take all lessons you want to take.

I’m not surprised the women didn’t get along with Fleur, she comes across as very superficial and arrogant. Everything is better where she is from. She’s always criticising things – Hogwarts, Britain, the Weasleys’ lifestyle… That would grate on their nerves.