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.
In 2009, Yale University Press published Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations (ISBN 9780300123838), an anthology of his work edited by Newsweek correspondent Jeremy McCarter.
His father, James Fairlie, was a heavy-drinking editor on Fleet Street; his mother, Marguerita Vernon, was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister.
[1] 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.
[5] In September 1955, 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.
He drank heavily and conducted a series of extramarital affairs, including one with the wife of his friend Kingsley Amis that nearly ended their marriage.
[13] His romantic attachment to the possibilities of American life found its fullest expression in a long essay titled "Why I Love America", which The New Republic published on 4 July 1983.