Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations (A New Republic Book) - Softcover

Fairlie, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300164602 ISBN 13: 9780300164602

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Henry Fairlie was one of the most colorful and trenchant journalists of the twentieth century. The British-born writer made his name on Fleet Street, where he coined the term “The Establishment,” sparred in print with the likes of Kenneth Tynan, and caroused with Kingsley Amis, among  many others. In America his writing found a home in the pages of the New Yorker and other top magazines and newspapers. When he died, he was remembered as “quite simply the best political journalist, writing in English, in the last fifty years.”

Remarkable for their prescience and relevance, Fairlie’s essays celebrate Winston Churchill, old-fashioned bathtubs, and American empire; they ridicule Republicans who think they are conservatives and yuppies who want to live forever. Fairlie is caustic, controversial, and unwavering—especially when attacking his employers. With an introduction by Jeremy McCarter, Bite the Hand That Feeds You restores a compelling voice that, among its many virtues, helps Americans appreciate their country anew.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in England, Henry Fairlie (1924–1990) was a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines including the Washington Post and the New Republic. Jeremy McCarter is a senior writer at Newsweek. He lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

A native British wit expresses an adopted American ebullience in this sparkling collection of political journalism and commentary. Fairlie (1924–1990) migrated from London to the U.S. in the 1960s, where his writings in the Washington Post, the New Republic and elsewhere both celebrated and pilloried the American scene. The unstuffy Brit applauds America's informality, its gadgetry, its abundance and vastness, and its personification in a cowboy-poet named Hooter he meets in a Mankato, Minn., bar, but he's appalled by its politics. An avowed Tory in Britain, he discovers conservatism's Reaganite version to be narrow-minded and selfish and mean-spirited; he duly eulogizes FDR, attacks George F. Will and denounces government bashing as the sneer of patronizing and vaulting privilege at the needs of ordinary people that can be served only by government. Whether stomping on the dangerous insects in the Washington media corps or defending his beloved Scotch whiskey against the Perrier water fad that prompted the abandonment of... a wholesome and convivial liquor for a suspect Gallic product, Fairlie's elegantly pugilistic prose still feels fresh—and surprisingly relevant to today's politics. (June)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0300164602
• ISBN 13: 9780300164602
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: McCarter Jeremy