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Horace Eugene Flaccus Slughorn was born into an ancient wizarding family,
the only son of doting and wealthy parents. Although a fundamentally goodtempered
boy, he was educated to believe in the value of the old boys’
network (his father was a high-ranking Ministry official in the Department of
International Magical Co-operation), and encouraged to make friends ‘of the
right sort’ once he arrived at Hogwarts. The Slughorn family is one of the socalled
‘Sacred Twenty-Eight’, (a select list of the only families designated
‘pure-blooded’ by an anonymous author in the 1930s) and while Slughorn’s
parents were never militant in their pure-blood beliefs, they encouraged a
quiet belief in the family’s innate superiority.
Horace was sorted instantly into Slytherin upon arrival at Hogwarts. He
proved himself an outstanding student, and while he did not follow his
parents’ implied instructions to the letter (numbering among his friends
several talented Muggle-borns), he practised his own brand of elitism. Horace
was drawn to those whose talents or backgrounds made them in any way
distinctive, revelling in reflected glory, and dazzled by celebrity of any
description. Even as a boy he was an embarrassingly loud name-dropper, and
would often refer to the Minister for Magic by his Christian name, happy to
imply that the family were on closer terms with him than was really the case.