Dear Readers,
Good evening, and welcome to the next part of our 2023 Review, and on the Friday before Christmas, no less. We’re going to run down our most popular pieces of the year, and we’re also going to shine a festive light on the 11/10 pieces published by other publications these last 12 months. And there’ll be the odd barbed comment to temper the ladles of praise. Stand by.
We’ve been deluged with snaps of Issue 18 living its best life, with Rowan Hunter pairing Issue 18 with a pint of Guinness, Max Hess gives a snowbound vista, Fiona Mozley summons a sneak peek of a séance, Megan Kenyon thankfully had some decent reading material at Euston – as did Patrick Christie – and Andrew Wilshire pays tribute to our ‘absurdly absurdist and absurdly cheap’ magazine.
And over on Instagram, Annabelle Hickson of Galah Press has paid us perhaps the nicest tribute we’ve ever received. Whip-smart, dishevelled but very handsome: we’re blushing!
We are continuing to near our goal of 1,000 new subscriptions for the year. We are now up to 947, so if you’ve been waiting to sign up, now is the moment.
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Also, if you’re feeling generous, please do share our appeal on Twitter here.
On Tuesday, we shared a playlist, asking if anyone would be able to join the dots and work out what connected all the tunes together. A lot of you made some inspired efforts but there was only one winner. We regret nothing.
We’re going to wrap our review of the year next Friday with an old-fashioned newsletter celebrating all our readers’ triumphs this year. So, if you’ve had a book published, a new mixtape drop or something very exciting happen that you want the world to know about, do send us a little précis to editorial@the-fence.com soonish. But we’ll start, as promised, with our eleven most popular articles of the year what was.
FENCE XI, 2023
A Novel Guide
An anonymous maven in the publishing industry provided us with our first palpable hit back in 2019, when they listed the 12 rules to get your first book published.
Just four years later, they returned with a fantastically mean but, sadly, entirely accurate article about what it’s like labouring in the foothills of the book world.
The Chic Young Divorcée, by Róisín Lanigan
This was only published on Tuesday, and it’s already one of the biggest hits of the year: it’s a moving personal essay about being divorced at the age of 30, just like Emily Ratajkowski. A perfect example of feature writing from our esteemed, delightful colleague.
At His Majesty’s Pleasure, by Jimmy McIntosh
Many of you write to tell us how much you enjoy the dispatches from our pints columnist. And the trip to Poundbury, to celebrate King Charles III’s coronation, was one such winning report, capturing the quiddity of the Carolean aesthetic as neatly as anything he’s ever writ.
From Rushdie with Love, by Asad Raza
A particularly acute satire on the postcolonial genre – we’ve been told that Kamila Shamsie herself thought it was very good, and there’s no higher praise than that.
Are you a Yimby?, by Bertie Brandes
If you are under the age of 40 and a subscriber to this magazine then you probably are one, truth be told.
For the rest of you who might be a bit confused, do check out this authoritative guide.
Bruce & Jeffrey, by Jane Rankin-Reid
In at number five is Jane Rankin-Reid’s moving remembrance of her evening with the brothers Bernard, the infamous Soho characters who, as Jane discovered, loved each other very deeply.
The Show Must Go On, by Isobel Thompson
This piece took two years to put together, as we searched for the ideal writer to tell the story of the community of Travelling Showmen who made Hampstead Heath their home for over a century. Isobel spoke to the Abbott family, and their memories of living in caravans in one of the world’s boujiest – and beautiful – urban districts are now thankfully preserved.
Cruising in the Trenches
In third place is another anonymous dispatch, and one that has some astonishing details within. Our correspondent travelled throughout war-torn Ukraine, finding out how the nation’s LGBT community continues to hook up even as the bombs fall.
The Definitive Guide to Scouseness, by Josh Mcloughlin
Who are the Plazzies and who are the Posh? Josh’s essay on the different tribes that make up Liverpool and its environs – the demarcations of which are the subject of splenetic debate – is a wonderfully controlled piece of writing that has led to a couple of mardy reactions from Scouse correspondents.
Alongside this piece, there was also the most wonderful Paul Cox map of Liverpool, which we attach below.
There are some of these still left on sale, they’re A2 sized, signed by the artist, and like everything we do, much too cheap at £40. Scroll down to the bottom of the shop page to score one.
One Liverpool Map for Me, Please
Mr Martin Bought The School, by Mark Blacklock
We’re very pleased this article has been picked up by the national press, and most importantly, seems to have led to legal action from the government. Mark’s investigation into the multi-millionare paedophile who bought a private school and moved it into his own Yorkshire home is, by some distance, the most important piece of journalism we’ve ever run.
But all credit goes to Mark, who tracked this story for four years, interviewing Martin’s victims and attending trials before he came to us with the piece pretty much finished. We’re very proud that we were able to publish it.
Last Minute Dot Com
If you’re stuck for a present for someone you love or for someone you quite like, then we really do think a subscription to the magazine is a very good idea.
It’s only £30, and it will last all year too, and you can finesse it from the comfort of your sofa just by clicking on the link below. It’s all very easy.
Gift a Subscription to The Fence
The Zest of the Best
2023, then. A great year for film; the best for some time. A great year for new music, too. An underwhelming year in fashion, a somewhat recherché year in food and an unparalleled year for insane political discourse – if that’s the sort of thing you go in for.
From a reader’s perspective, it’s been a pretty amazing year for journalism and, astoundingly, some very good writing has ended up not being published by us. So, in the spirit of yuletide bonhomie, we’ve gathered the absolute best of the best. We promise no waffly treatises or dorky navel-gazing, no discourse-bothering thinkpieces or self-important screeds. These are simply the pieces that delighted us by how good they were. Let’s get it going.
This year has been bookended by Prince Harry’s forays into and also against the media world, and his memoir was a publishing phenomenon in January. Even if you’re a committed republican – especially if you’re a committed republican! – it’s one of the most fascinating documents written since… forever? Andrew O’Hagan’s rollicking review of the book in the LRB is possibly the best thing that august journal did this year.
Cultural criticism is both an ugly term and a vital art, and perhaps the best example of the year was Mark O’Connell’s icy takedown of the oeuvre of Martin McDonagh, Mr Phoebe Waller-Bridge himself.
Ed Cumming and his team at the Telegraph kicked the hornet’s nest with this deep dive into the rewriting of the Roald Dahl universe – the culture wars will come for us all. Also goes to show that sometimes headline scoops are there, just waiting to be written.
Sometimes you read stories, and think ‘how the hell did that journalist get such good access?’ And so it is with Gabriel Sherman’s cover story on the real-life succession drama roiling the Murdoch dynasty as its patriarch hands over the reins in his ninth decade.
Of late, New York magazine have published lots of pieces that hark back to the Spy glory years. The nepo babies, at the end of last year. Age gap dispatches, just now. But perhaps the best was this guide to modern etiquette, an enjoyably provocative piece that still reads really well some months later.
Tom Lamont’s lovely lament for the disappearing fish and chip shops of the Scottish coast serves as a neat encapsulation of how many eateries are being battered (sorry) by runaway energy costs. Support local businesses, while you can.
There are so many distressing things going on in the world today that it’s often all too easy to zone out of some grim new development. And so it is with Bitcoin mining. This NYT visual feature breaks down the real-world costs of the crypto ‘pioneers’ with graphical brio.
Similarly, climate change has become all too real lately. It’s getting too hot out here! Rosa Lyster’s piece on how the Attenborough-helmed BBC show Planet Earth has gone from ideal inter-generational viewing to the stuff of nightmares is much funnier than we’re making it sound.
Amelia Tait’s self-published piece on the untold story of Gwyenth Paltrow’s body double was picked up by the Guardian, and we’re going to link to its original TinyLetter outing, as nearly every other piece in this list was published by a conglomerate. And it’s a wonderful piece, too.
The art world is very, very secretive. And for most of this century, the most powerful person within it has been Larry ‘Larry G’ Gagosian, a charismatic dealer who rolls on the same level as the people he sells pictures to. Patrick Radden Keefe’s profile of him is a must-read.
Nesrine Malik dreams of the truly great Britain she knew when she first came to the country in the noughties. This is the only op-ed on the list, as we imagine it will only grow more prescient when Labour takes power next year.
Sometimes, all an editor needs to do is to send a great writer to peep some weirdos. Clive Martin’s Manchester dispatch for The Face is such an example, as he watches a load of YouTubers rebrand themselves as professional boxers.
It’s pretty much nailed-on that Madison Marriage, Antonia Cundy and Paul Caruana Galizia are going to win all the prizes next year for their investigation into the hedge fund tycoon, Crispin Odey. And they deserve to. By some distance, the most impactful work of British journalism this year.
Alas, the same cannot be said of this Propublica piece, which exhaustively details how US Supreme Court judge, Clarence Thomas, has been treated to 20 years of undisclosed luxury vacations by a Republican donor called Harlan Crow.
Gabriel Pogrund is a terrifyingly prolific scoop-sourcer, and how he got this story on the traumatised MI6 operative who was sent to jihadi camp is something we would really like to know.
This summer, there were vain and wild hopes that, with international support, the Ukrainian Army could smash Putin’s forces. Now, the picture looks very different. Luke Mogelson’s Donbas dispatch shows the vantablack horror of trench warfare in the 21st century.
Another NY’er marmalade dropper from Heidi Blake, who tells the story of the fugitive princesses of Dubai, who did everything to escape from their father, only for the forces of the British crown – among others – to foil their desperate plans. (It’s been a very good year for the New Yorker, it must be said).
One more art world tale, courtesy of Hannah Ghorashi and George Pendle – a madcap dash around the freaks and fraudsters of the Mayfair gallery scene. Has anyone else published a piece this year with three twists?
And there we have it. That’s enough goodwill for at least a year. Happy reading.
If you want to speak to us about an order, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com and we will attend to you promptly. And if you would like to be featured in Ye Olde Newsletter next Friday, drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com
We will be back on Boxing Day with the penultimate outing of the year. Until then, we wish you a very Merry Christmas.
All the best,
TF