While Le Carre and Waugh were "anti-American," let's be sure and specify their type. The former is of the left-wing variety, anti-colonial, anti-imperial, "no blood for oil" lunacy; the latter is of the right-wing variety, aristocratic, anti-democratic, even reactionary. One is driven by ideological hatred of the great anti-socialist power, the other by fear of excessive democracy and dumbed-down rule of the mob. There is a qualitative difference here.

And let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lord Salisbury was pro-Confederate in the Civil War based on fears of another 1848. His biographer David Steele writes: He was prey, literally, to contemporary nightmares about the possibility of new and more terrible upheavals in a Europe which had not forgotten the June Days of 1848 in Paris. He saw aristocracy in the Old South (as did Gladstone) and preferred that to the raucus democracy of the victorious North, the example of which would cause the real political struggle of our age ... between classes who have property and the classes who have none. A reasonable fear considering European history over the next 100 years, but one based on a misunderstanding of the nature of both North and South.

He also saw in America an imperial competitor, again a perfectly reasonable assumption. In later years, he regretted that the British did not intervene in the Civil War because it could have split the US into two parts, and cut American power and aspirations down to manageable proportions. He wrote in 1902, It is very sad but I am afraid America is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us ... Two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career. Hardly the ravings of a loony anti-American zealot.

In short, I think we can learn a lot and still enjoy the company of Waugh, Salisbury, Eliot, and others. Le Carre and his ilk, however, do not darken my door.

And while I do love Waugh, Nathaniel Hawthorne has always been my "literary hero." You should know that.