Henry Fairlie

Henry Jones Fairlie (13 January 1924 London, England - 25 February 1990 Washington, D.C.) 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.

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.

After taking his degree in 1945, Fairlie began his journalism career at the Manchester Evening News, followed by a brief stint working for David Astor at the Observer. During this time he married Lisette Todd Phillips, with whom he would have a son and two daughters.

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