Customer Reviews

Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations

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In his day Henry Fairlie was well known and highly regarded as a journalist. While this current collection of essays is a bit uneven, it is a good introduction to the man and his work, and several of the essays, particularly his take-down of George Will, are worth the price of the book. There is also an excellent introduction that locates him in time and place.

Fairlie called himself a tory, admired Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt enormously, had a almost romantic but clear eyed affection for America, despised American conservatism (see his piece on the 1980 Republican convention), drank and smoked too much, womanized, and spent his last years sleeping on a couch in his office at the New Republic. He died before he should have, and left, not unusual in a journalist, an uneven body of work. He was a journalist, not a theorist, and had no grand ideas on politics or society. Like other writers of similar inclination though he had a strong sense of what worked, in the England of his day and the America he came to in his 40s.

Would that he were alive today. In the era of Sarah Palin and John Boehner we could desperately use him.