Still the Coloniesnby Katherine DaltonnSince the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chiefnpropagandist for the emerging American colonies thenUnited States has been subject to invasion by Britishnjournalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of taxncollecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and ifndoing so involved the common sense of opposing Englishntaxes, that is just one of history’s little ironies. The latenHenry Fairiie, who had made his home at the New Republicnuntil his death in February, came here in 1965 because afterncalling Antonia Eraser a name over British radio, he foundnhe could not pay the damages assessed against him when shenwon her case for libel. Christopher Hitchens, Harper’snWashington editor and columnist for the Nation, says hencame here because the U.S. is “immense and varied andnimportant.” Tom Bethell of the American Spectator camenhere in 1962 because, he says, “I liked jazz.”nWhatever their past in England, they often do very wellnin America. People like S.I. Newhouse seem to hire nothingnbut Brits, installing Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, her husband,nHarold Evans, at Conde Nast Traveler, and sending AnnanWintour from American Vogue to British Vogiie to House &nGarden back to replace Grace Mirabella at AmericannVogue. When William F. Buckley, Jr. needed someone tonhead up his National Review, he went after an EnglishnCatholic, not an American one, hiring John O’Sullivan, latenof the London Telegraph and London Times. EnglishmannJohn Evans established himself at the Village Voice yearsnago and was for several more years president of MurdochnMagazines in America before getting promoted up. AnthonynHayden-Guest still haunts New York and has proved sonenduring a character that Tom Wolfe drew freely from himnfor Peter Fallow in Bonfire of the Vanities. Even MTV hadnto go all the way to London to find a girl with just the rightncombination of servility, vulgarity, and rhythm to become itsnstar veejay.nKatherine Dalton is the managing editor of Chronicles.n20/CHRONICLESnnnWe are as we have always been, ripe for colonization bynthe British press. One of the big moments in Americannjournalism, the New York Herald’s discovery of DavidnLivingston, recovering on the shores of Lake Tanganyika,nwas engineered by Henry Morton Stanley, ne John Rowlandsnin Wales. (Who ever heard of an American, even innthe last century, saying “I presume”?) The Herald’s founder,nJohn Gordon Bennett, came from Scotland to New Yorknto start the paper in 1835. As for the two best-known foreignngadflies of American government and society at the moment.nEnglishman Christopher Hitchens and IrishmannAlexander Cockburn, in hiring them as columnists thenNation is only holding true to the tradition of its founder,nEdwin Lawrence Godkin, an Irishman who importednhimself to America in 1856.nAs the biographies of some of these above-mentionedngentlemen show, the British import is not always the mostnattractive character. For many of them the prototype seemsnto be Corker in Scoop, or Wolfe’s Peter Fallow. (FornCockburn the relationship to Waugh is more than incidental:nWaugh was his cousin.) The stories about Henry Fairiienare legion, and involve wine, women, setting one host’snhouse to smoldering and a trek by trailer across the countrynto find America. One of Anthony Hayden-Guest’s nicknamesnin New York is “Unwelcome,” and Spy magazine isnforever twitting him about wine, women, and his inability tonpick up the tab. For these men America can be verynconvenient, and their easy usage is not limited to thisncentury. William Cobbett came to live in America for threenperiods in his life: once as a soldier, and twice (in 1792 andn1817) when he feared prosecution in England for sedition.nHe liked life on Long Island, and he did not miss thenGagging Acts (or his creditors), but “I myself,” he wrote inn1818, “am bound to England for life.”nMen like Henry Morton Stanley are the 19th-centurynparadigm for the wandering British academic of today, whonteaches at Oxford for half the year for prestige, and atn