Francis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
Wheen was born into an army family [1] and educated at two independent schools: Copthorne Preparatory School near Crawley, West Sussex, and Harrow School in north west London. At Harrow, he was briefly a contemporary of Mark Thatcher, [2] who has been a subject of his journalism. [3]
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Booknotes interview with Wheen on Karl Marx: A Life, 25 June 2000, C-SPAN |
Running away from Harrow at 16 "to join the alternative society," Wheen had early periods as a "dogsbody" at The Guardian and the New Statesman before attending Royal Holloway College, University of London, following a period spent at a crammer. [1]
Wheen is the author of several books, including a biography of Karl Marx [4] which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1999, [5] and has been translated into twenty languages. [6] He followed this with a notional "biography" of Das Kapital , which follows the creation and publication of the first volume of Marx's major work as well as other incomplete volumes. Wheen had a column in The Guardian for several years. He wrote for Private Eye and became the magazine's deputy editor. He retired from Private Eye in October 2022, [7] [8] though he still occasionally contributes.
His collected journalism, Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies, won him the Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard .
In April 2012, Wheen suffered the loss of his entire book collection, his "life's work", and an unfinished novel, in a garden shed fire. [9] [10]
Wheen broadcasts regularly, mainly on BBC Radio 4, has made many appearances on The News Quiz , in which he has often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith. [11] He has also several times been a guest on Have I Got News for You .[ citation needed ]
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List , for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007, the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (then Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme. [12]
Wheen was opposed to the Falklands War. In an article syndicated to a number of American newspapers, Wheen stated: "In a famous British play of the 1950s, Look Back in Anger , the hero complained that 'there aren't any good, brave causes to fight for anymore'. Mrs Thatcher apparently agrees with this view, so she went to war over a small, ignoble cause." [13] Wheen is a supporter of the anti-monarchist group Republic. [14]
Wheen supported NATO's Kosovo intervention in 1999, signed the Euston Manifesto for a realignment of progressive politics [15] and supported the second Iraq War. [16]
In late 2005, Wheen was the co-author with David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, both contributors to The Times , of a complaint to The Guardian after it published an apology and correction in respect of an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes which had been published at the end of October 2005; [17] Chomsky had complained that the interview was defamatory in suggesting that he denied the 1995 Srebrenica massacre by his defence of a book by Diana Johnstone. [18]
Francis Wheen was intensely critical of Foreign Office minister Baroness Anelay's failure to condemn the torture of Raif Badawi by the government of Saudi Arabia in 2016. Wheen maintained that Anelay's approach was motivated by her wish to sell arms to the Saudi régime. [19]
Wheen was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993. He has been the partner for 27 years of Julia Jones (formerly Julia Thorogood) since the mid-1990s whom he married in 2019; they have two sons. [1]
In 2014, Wheen waived his right to anonymity in order to speak about being a victim of Charles Napier, one-time treasurer of the defunct Paedophile Information Exchange, after the former teacher was convicted of sexually abusing 23 boys between 1967 and 1983. Wheen described his experience as less serious than that of other victims, and had only become aware of the scale of Napier's activities later. [20] [21]
Wheen was a close friend of the writer Christopher Hitchens. [22]
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and is the culmination of his intellectual efforts. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author, journalist and educator. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence", is still of mark in philosophy and law.
Polemic is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called polemics, which are seen in arguments on controversial topics. A person who writes polemics, or speaks polemically, is called a polemicist. The word derives from Ancient Greek πολεμικός 'warlike, hostile', from πόλεμος 'war'.
Paul Mackintosh Foot was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an English conservative author, broadcaster, journalist, and commentator. He writes for The Mail on Sunday and was a foreign correspondent reporting from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. Peter Hitchens has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. His books include The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, The War We Never Fought and The Phoney Victory.
Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site's editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media's coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately".
David Morris Aaronovitch is an English journalist, television presenter and author. He is a regular columnist for The Times and the author of Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country (2000), Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Modern History (2009) and Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (2016). He won the Orwell Prize for political journalism in 2001, and the What the Papers Say "Columnist of the Year" award for 2003. He previously wrote for The Independent and The Guardian.
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Emma Brockes is a British author and a contributor to The Guardian and The New York Times. She lives in New York.
This article is about the particular significance of the year 1965 to Wales and its people.
Bob Mellors was a British gay rights activist.
Political repression of cyber-dissidents is the oppression or persecution of people for expressing their political views on the Internet.
Tom Gross is a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East. Gross was formerly a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. He now works as an opinion journalist and has written for both Arab and Israeli newspapers, as well as European and American ones, both liberal and conservative. He also appears as a commentator on the BBC in English, BBC Arabic, and various Middle Eastern and other networks.
Nicholas Davies is a British investigative journalist, writer, and documentary maker.
Scorpion and Felix, A Humoristic Novel is the only comedic fictional story to have been written by Karl Marx. Written in 1837 when he was 19 years old, it has remained unpublished. It was likely written under the influence of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.
Samar bint Muhammad Badawi is a Saudi Arabian human rights activist. She and her father filed court cases against each other. Badawi's father accused her of disobedience under the Saudi Arabian male guardianship system and she charged her father with adhl—"making it hard or impossible for a person, especially a woman, to have what she wants, or what's rightfully hers; e.g, her right to marry" according to Islamic jurisprudence—for refusing to allow her to marry. After Badawi missed several trial dates relating to the charge, an arrest warrant was issued for her, and Badawi was imprisoned on 4 April 2010. In July 2010, Jeddah General Court ruled in Samar Badawi's favor, and she was released on 25 October 2010, and her guardianship was transferred to an uncle. There had been a local and international support campaign for her release. The Saudi NGO Human Rights First Society described Badawi's imprisonment as "outrageous illegal detention".
Raif bin Muhammad Badawi is a Saudi writer, dissident and activist, as well as the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals.
The political slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is one of the rallying cries from The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation of this phrase is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone. The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict.
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto. Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began writing for other radical newspapers and met Fredrick Engels, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1845 he was exiled and moved to London together with his wife and children where he continued writing and formulating his theories about social and economic activity. He also campaigned for socialism and became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
Edgar Marcel Longuet, was a French physician and socialist activist, and a grandson of Karl Marx.
Three years ago today, Saudi Arabian police arrested Raif Badawi for the crime of running a website 'that propagates liberal thought' ...