"While an author is alive," he explains, "there's still hope of changes in a next edition, if one writes. Afterwards... not very often." He's not being as hypocritical as one might think; although he hasn't had to deal with British hecklers much in the last ten years or so, foreign brewers are another story.
Since Holmes knows nothing about either house elves or the morally-bipolar-but-not-really Crouches, he asks, "In which direction first?"