Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome once more to Off The Fence, arriving in your inbox just as promptly (we hope) as our latest issue has been hitting the country’s doormats. Issue 16 is officially up, off and away, and is now being cherished and devoured by our subscribers.
And the snaps are rolling in! John Greenfield took his to a metal bar in Birmingham and tore right into it, free lunch editor ‘Free Lunch’ Ed Cumming opted to read his in front of his giant poster of The Great Beauty (he rated this one 9/10), and cover artist Miki Lowe papped the issue on the shelves of our friends at magCulture. Chris Coates tells us that he ‘started at the front’ and has ‘already laughed out loud several times’; Michael Hunter gave us a helluva sales pitch, opining on ‘the delicious, crisp impact as the print edition hits the floorboards, the doormat, the draft excluder’. Hugh Smithson-Wright described the issue’s lead feature – a dispatch on Ukraine’s wartime gay culture – as ‘worth the cover price alone’.
As it lands, do send us a snap as we really do love to see them – the weirder the location, the better. If you can send us a copy from somewhere truly bizarre, up a mountain or in a Hamburg sex dungeon or something: we’ll award a bottle of Aldi champagne to the winner. You can find us on Twitter here, or on Instagram.
What, pray tell, are those lucky subscribers reading in our pages? Well, this issue is The Classified Issue: our paean to all things cloak-and-dagger, dripping with intrigue like a Raymond Chandler novel but with more gags about Shinzo Abe. As we’ve mentioned in previous editions of this newsletter and will continue to hammer home, this one is the very best we’ve ever done: star-studded, hefty, silly, and beautifully designed if we say so ourselves. A copy can be yours for just £7.50; a copy plus three more across the next 12 months will cost you £24.99. Just get on with it and sign up today.
Now we can begin through a series of highlights and featurettes for your Tuesday afternoon reading. This week, we’re all about chippies and beautiful houses, but first, a little slice of primo intel from the high-powered world of art dealing.
Not Quite Priceless
Patrick Radden Keefe’s mega profile of mega art dealer, Larry Gagosian, is the piece that everyone’s talking about. We spoke to an anonymous insider who operates at the very top of the pyramid for some more juice on Larry G:
On a Sunday night in New York when ‘everybody’s’ cooks are having the night off, the wealthy, – – no, the very wealthy – well, actually, the wealthiest descend on a low-key restaurant called Sette Mezzo, found at 969 Lexington Avenue. I arrived one evening as a guest of an old friend. There at the central table was Larry with Si Newhouse, Henry Kravis and Alberto Mugrabi… the titans of the art collecting world. And there was Larry, one of them and the only person in the art world who had that level of pulling power. No one else could operate like that.
He would go to someone’s apartment and say ‘I like your painting … I’ll buy it from you’. The owner would have no intention of selling it. With one Picasso that was hanging on a wall in Paris, Larry knew that it was worth 20 million dollars, and said ‘I’ll give you 18’ and the owner resisted. Larry then said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you 23 now’... and they accepted.
This ploy usually worked. He played the bigger game. Always the bigger game. He could sell it for more. He knew that. Like with Duveen, there were always Gagosian prices.
This Must Be the Plaice
It is always a good time of year when another Tom Lamont barnstormer comes out in the pages of the Grauniad, and this latest effort, on the chippies of the East Neuk of Fife, is a beautiful, devastating bit of writing. Reported over the course of a year between three fish & chip shops, each struggling restlessly against the tides of war, inflation and the energy crisis, the story is an elegy for what is – sadly, uncomfortably – a fading force in British hospitality.
Lamont intersperses his reportage with the desperate pleas through local news from chippies all over the country, each asking for punters or councils to keep them afloat. For many, it’s an impossible task when just about everything that goes into keeping a chippy open has at least tripled in price over the last 12 months.
Last week saw the closure of Fishy Business in Brockley, after twenty-three years of manfully chucking out liberal portions of chips of a standard and price that’s incredibly rare in the South of England. It was never the busiest or the flashiest but God, it was good. It’s hard to say if ringing the tills will save all our fried-fish purveyors but it’s a start – go get some while you still can.
Literary Review
Last week, we promised you the follow-up to our publishing insider piece on how to get your first book published. Now, we have the piece ready for you all to read – it’s already proved very popular online. We would also love to have more of this pieces, written with real insight and a little dose of venom – if you work in an industry that is misunderstood or underreported – please get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com.
She’s Just A Cosmic Girl
We were remiss in not saluting Michael Hopkins, who along with his wife, Patty Hopkins, designed one of London’s most singular residences, ‘Hopkins House’, which you can find on Downshire Hill.
It won’t be long till the heritage bods, you hope, will upgrade the classification to that sweet, sweet Grade-1 status. One private contemporary residence that does revel on that rarity is Cosmic House in Holland Park, designed by Charles Jencks. It’s one of the most amazing places in London, and you can now make your visit via a pre-booking through the website. It will be a mainstay in all the guidebooks very soon.
In Case You Missed It
Ethan Croft gives good profile in this portrait of parliament’s newest, and youngest, MP Keir Mather.
What were you doing when you were 18? Undergraduate Theo Baker just won a Polk Award after his investigation for Stanford’s student paper caused the University’s president to resign.
Michal Gillard has only gone and done it again with this true life tale of bent coppers, eye-popping bribes, and Soho-scented sleaze over at The Upsetter.
Friend of TF, Peter Geoghegan chimes in with this report on dark money and dirty fuels behind secretive British think tanks.
In the best tie-in of the week, Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican jumps off Barbie’s box office domination with an Oral History of Malibu Stacy.
And Finally
Big shoutout to Sky Sports News’ Chief Reporter, Kaveh Solhekol, for the greatest round on Just a Minute since the death of Nicholas Parsons, in this mind-numbingly inane clip about Kylian Mbappe’s purported move to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Start at around 0:28 and marvel at how Solhekol explains the mechanics of a football transfer offer in the plainest, most granular terms, pausing on every syllable like his life depends on reaching the minute mark. It is weirdly kind of engrossing after four or five watches.
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to speak about an order, please get in touch at subscriptions@the-fence.com. Hopefully the summer weather will be with us again soon.
All the best,
TF