Henry fairlie george will biography

British political journalist and social critic

Henry Fairlie
Born	()January 13, London, England
Died	February 25, () (aged&#;66) Washington D.C.
Occupation	Journalist
Alma&#;mater	Christi College, Oxford

Henry Jones Fairlie (13 January , in London, England – 25 February , in Washington, D.C.) was a British political journalist and social critic, known for popularizing the term "the Establishment", an analysis of how "all the right people" came to run Britain largely through social connections.

He spent 36 years as a prominent freelance writer on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing in The Spectator, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and many other papers and magazines. He was also the author of five books, most notably The Kennedy Promise, an early revisionist critique of the US presidency of John F.

Kennedy.

Madeleine will If one really feared democracy, if one really feared the people, one would not waste time discrediting a Democrat as against a Republican, a liberal as against a conservative; one would simply discredit them all, candidates and voters. This vaunt assumes its most outlandish form in the preface to The Pursuit of Virtue. Simultaneously, Will began questioning policies like the drug war, viewing them through the lens of government overreach rather than social-engineering. It is thrown in.

In , Yale University Press published Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations (ISBN&#;), an anthology of his work edited by Newsweek correspondent Jeremy McCarter.

Biography

Fairlie was born in London, the fifth of seven children in a family of Scottish descent.

His father, James Fairlie, was a heavy-drinking editor on Fleet Street; his mother, Marguerita Vernon, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Fairlie attended Byron House and Highgate School before studying Modern History at Corpus Christi, Oxford.^[1]

After taking his degree in , Fairlie began his journalism career at the Manchester Evening News, followed by a brief stint working for David Astor at The Observer.

George will on gay marriage: So Will has appealed to Toryism, a peculiarly English political tradition; to the names of three English conservatives, if we overlook the fact that Burke was Irish; and to an English movement that was concerned with the defense of the creed and liturgy of the Anglican Church. But it is the absence of more than an occasional appeal to an American political tradition that is most damaging. British political journalist and social critic. No four-year-old boy had ever addressed me without an introduction before.

During this time he married Lisette Todd Phillips, with whom he had a son and two daughters.^[2] He had an affair with Kingsley Amis's wife, Hilly, in ^[3]

Fleet Street

In , Fairlie joined the staff of The Times, rising at an early age to become the chief writer of its leaders on domestic politics.^[4] In , he gave up the security of that post to assume the greater independence of a freelance writer, which he remained until the end of his life.

As the author of the "Political Commentary" column in The Spectator, first under the nom de plume "Trimmer", then under his own byline, he helped define the modern political column.^[5]

In September , Fairlie devoted a column to how the friends and acquaintances of Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean, two members of the Foreign Office widely believed to have defected to Moscow, tried to deflect press scrutiny from the men's families.

He defined that network of prominent, well-connected people as "the Establishment", explaining:

By the 'Establishment' I do not mean only the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.

The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially.^[6]

The term was quickly picked up in newspapers and magazines all over London, making Fairlie famous.^[7] The Oxford English Dictionary cited Fairlie's column as its locus classicus.

Henry fairlie george will biography A patrician pundit waving around a copy of the Homestead Act makes a perfect mascot for a movement that is more reactionary than revolutionary. George Will, the Washington Post columnist and TV personality who recently made a much-publicized switch from ABC to Fox News, loves talking about government: how it works, why it fails, and the know-it-alls who run it. Before we can find his conclusions in "the minds of the Oxford Movement," we need to know whose minds Will is talking about. Simultaneously, Will began questioning policies like the drug war, viewing them through the lens of government overreach rather than social-engineering.

However, he later determined that Ralph Waldo Emerson had really been the first to use "the Establishment" in this fashion.^{[citation needed]}

As Fairlie became better known, his personal life grew chaotic. He drank heavily and conducted a series of extramarital affairs, including one with the wife of his friend Kingsley Amis that nearly ended their marriage.^[8] Never responsible with money, he amassed thousands of pounds of debts.^[9] Also, in , he insulted Lady Antonia Fraser on television, which led to a libel suit against him and the Independent Television Authority.^[10] That year, he visited America for the first time and fell immediately in love with the country.

A few months later, he moved there for good.^[11]

America

Fairlie was an anomaly in Washington, a Tory whose unique brand of conservatism frequently left him more sympathetic to the Democrats than the Republicans. These heterodox politics helped him find a perch at The New Republic, where he was a regular contributor from the mids until his death in In the mids, when he was unable to keep up payments on his apartment, he was even reduced to living in his office there, sleeping on a couch next to his desk.^[12]

Fairlie devoted much of the second half of his career to trying to explain America to Americans.

Between and , he wrote "Fairlie at Large", a bi-weekly column for The Washington Post. In those pieces he often abandoned political subjects to write about American manners and morals: for instance, why Americans would do well to give up showers in favour of more contemplative baths.^[13] His romantic attachment to the possibilities of American life found its fullest expression in a long essay titled "Why I Love America", which The New Republic published on 4 July

In the winter of , Fairlie fell in the lobby of The New Republic, breaking a hip.

After a brief hospitalisation, he died on 25 February. His ashes were buried in the family plot in Scotland.^[14]

Books

• The Life of Politics, Methuen,
• The Kennedy Promise, Doubleday,
• The Spoiled Child of the Western World: The Miscarriage of the American Idea in Our Time, Doubleday,
• The Parties: Republicans and Democrats in This Century, St.

  Martin's,

• The Seven Deadly Sins Today, New Republic Books,
• Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations, edited by Jeremy McCarter, Yale University Press,

Notes

External links