Henry Jones Fairlie 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.
13 Facts About Henry Fairlie
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Henry Fairlie 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.
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Henry Fairlie was the author of five books, most notably The Kennedy Promise, an early revisionist critique of the US presidency of John F Kennedy.
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Henry Fairlie's father, James Fairlie, was a heavy-drinking editor on Fleet Street; his mother, Marguerita Vernon, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.
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Henry Fairlie attended Byron House and Highgate School before studying Modern History at Corpus Christi, Oxford.
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Henry Fairlie had an affair with Kingsley Amis's wife, Hilly, in 1956.
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In 1950, Henry Fairlie joined the staff of The Times, rising at an early age to become the chief writer of its leaders on domestic politics.
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In September 1955, Henry 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.
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Henry Fairlie defined that network of prominent, well-connected people as "the Establishment", explaining:.
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Henry Fairlie drank heavily and conducted a series of extramarital affairs, including one with the wife of his friend Kingsley Amis that nearly ended their marriage.
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Henry Fairlie was an anomaly in Washington, a Tory whose unique brand of conservatism frequently left him more sympathetic to the Democrats than the Republicans.
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Henry Fairlie devoted much of the second half of his career to trying to explain America to Americans.
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Henry Fairlie's ashes were buried in the family plot in Scotland.