Henry Fairlie

Who was Henry Fairlie?

Henry Jones Fairlie was a British political journalist and social critic. Sometimes mistakenly believed to have coined 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 U.S. presidency of John F. Kennedy.

In 2009, Yale University Press published Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations, an anthology of his work edited by Newsweek correspondent Jeremy McCarter.