Edmund Fawcett
Non-fiction writer
About
Edmund Fawcett is an author and journalist with a career-long interest in political philosophy and the arts. His books include two histories of political thought, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2014; 2018), and Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020). A follow-up, in progress, will be Nation and Identity.
At The Economist, he was chief correspondent in Brussels, Washington, Paris and Berlin, as well as European and literary editor. When correspondent, he was blessed by a stellar network of local, non-staff stringers, whose copy he might rewrite but whose guidance, knowledge and rescues from blunder were invaluable. As nobody at school or university taught him to write clearly and economically, he had to learn painfully for himself, chiefly by editing, at New Left Books in London and for the books arm of Rolling Stone in San Francisco.
Left-liberal in outlook, he has published several articles on the rise of an exclusionary, nation-obsessed hard right. His frequent reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Political Quarterly and the Royal Academy’s art magazine, RA.
He and his wife live in London, their son and grandson in Portugal. After a younger son, keen on music, died in 1996, his wife set up and ran for 20 years a trust to give young musicians chances to perform in public. With friends at an old house in Spitalfields they host a lively bi-monthly gathering of 40–50 interested folk to hear a talk on books, arts or ideas.