Henry Fairlie

Henry Jones Fairlie (born January 13, 1924 in London , † February 25, 1990 in Washington, DC ) was a British journalist , political columnist and author . After nine years with British newspapers, from 1954 he freelanced for various publications in the United Kingdom and the United States .

Life

Henry Fairlie's father, James Fairlie, came from a Scottish farming family but had moved to London in the early 20th century to work as an editor on Fleet Street . Henry was the fifth of seven children. Since he was exempted from military service because of a weak heart, Henry Fairlie took directly after his school career, a study of history at Corpus Christi College of the University of Oxford in which he finished 1,945th He then found employment as a journalist with the Manchester Evening News , soon after moving to the Sunday newspaper The Observer and finally to the Times of London . During this time he married Lisette Todd Phillips, with whom he had three children.

In 1954 he gave up his permanent position at the Times and began - initially under the nom de plume Trimmer , after some time under his real name - to write a political column for the weekly magazine The Spectator . One of those articles from 1955 became famous for supposedly inventing the modern meaning of the term establishment . Fairlie wrote in a text on Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean that he “by the 'establishment' [...] not only mean the centers of political power - although these are part of it - but the whole matrix of official and social relations with whom power is exercised "( By the 'Establishment' I do not only mean the centers of official power - though they are certainly part of it - but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations with which power is exercised ). The term quickly found its way into the parlance of the British press and as a winged word itself was ascribed to Fairlie in the Oxford English Dictionary , although Fairlie himself pointed to an earlier similar use by Alan JP Taylor .

From 1956 to 1960 Fairlie worked for the Daily Mail , then on an irregular basis for other British newspapers. He first visited the United States in 1965 while working for the Sunday Telegraph and decided a few months later to move to Washington, DC. His family initially moved to America as well, but soon returned to Great Britain. In the USA, Fairlie wrote articles and essays as well as books, of which his 1973 criticism of John F. Kennedy , The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation , achieved a large number of copies. From the mid-1970s he wrote regularly for The New Republic and The Washington Post . For the latter, he wrote a twice-weekly column "Fairlie at Large" from 1976 to 1982. He had a permanent office in the editorial office of the weekly magazine The New Republic , for which he wrote political essays , among other things - which he temporarily lived in in the mid-1980s when he could not pay the rent for his apartment. In early 1990, Fairlie broke her hip in a fall and died a few days later in hospital, weakened by heart problems and alcohol abuse.

plant

As a political commentator, Fairlie vehemently defended his position as a British Tory with a fascination for the United States that had awakened in the mid-1960s. His British interpretation of conservatism often brought him closer to positions of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party .

Books

In addition to numerous articles and essays published in daily newspapers and magazines, Fairlie wrote five books; a sixth was published posthumously as an anthology .

• Henry Jones Fairlie: The Life of Politics . Methuen, London 1968 (English, 271 pages).
• Henry Jones Fairlie: The Kennedy Promise: The Politics of Expectation . Doubleday , New York City 1973, ISBN 978-0-385-00559-3 (English, 376 pages).
• Henry Jones Fairlie: The Spoiled Child of the Western World: The Miscarriage of the American Idea in Our Time . Doubleday , New York City 1976, ISBN 978-0-385-04936-8 (English, 350 pages).
• Henry Jones Fairlie: The Parties: Republicans and Democrats in This Century . St Martin's Press, New York City 1978, ISBN 978-0-312-59738-2 (English).
• Henry Jones Fairlie: The Seven Deadly Sins Today . University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame (Indiana) 1979, ISBN 978-0-268-01698-2 (English, 224 pages).
• Henry Jones Fairlie: Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations . Yale University Press , New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-12383-8 (English, 368 pages, compiled by Jeremy McCarter).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Both dark and light in the myth . In: The Australian Financial Review . Fairfax Media , November 9, 2009, ISSN  0404-2018 (English, full text ).
2. ^ ^{A b} Henry Jones Fairlie: Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations . Yale University Press , New Haven 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-12383-8 , pp. 3-4; 11-12 (English, compiled by Jeremy McCarter).