A.A. Gill – författare

The finest TV critic of our time talks about Sport, Sitcoms, News, the Weather, Children''s programmes and ''Reality Television''.A.A. Gill has been the must-read television critic in the SUNDAY TIMES ''Culture'' section for more than ten years. This collection of some of the best writing from his columns is broken down into themes - Sport, Costume Drama, Detectives, Children''s Television, and News. And now it''s over to A.A. Gill:''Those who complain, usually from the Parnassian heights of print journalism, that TV is dumbed-down and peddles dross to the lowest common denominator, citing Big Brother or Celibate Love Island, miss the point...In barely a generation, the information from television has changed the way we see the world and everyone in it. That''s no small achievement. Television really does make a difference... It can bring down walls, save lives and right wrongs. It can also tell you how to put a water feature on your patio...''

Britain''s most readable journalist takes on his biggest challenge - America.Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? Today the answer more often than not is going to be ''not born''. You have to be some way past 45 to know where you were when Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963. A generation later, you could ask the same question about the World Trade Centre. Where were you when the plane hit the twin towers on 11 September 2001? But this book is about what happened between those two moments. The world''s perception of America changed between those two waves.A.A. Gill''s book is about the things he''s always found admirable and optimistic about the United States and its citizens. Two of the happiest times of his life were spent living in New York and the mountains of Kentucky. The contrast between the two couldn''t have been more complicated and different. The America he found was contradictory and elusive, not the simpletons'' place he''d been led to believe. It was still a list of raw ingredients rather than the old stew of Europe.Now A.A. Gill takes another look at the America he knew in the 1970s, a place that seemed to hold promise, practical energy and a plan for the future. How did it become the political magnetic north, against which the liberal intellectuals from the rest of the world set their opinions? Why is it so easily mocked, so comprehensively blamed, so thoughtlessly hated?This book is a collection of linked essays based around places that will open up truths and mythologies about America and Americans. The theme of his journey will be searching for ''the home of''. Every other small town in America boasts on its Welcome sign that it is the home of something or other: a mountain, a mine, peaches, spotted pigs, a president, the world''s biggest ball of string, barbecues, the deepest hole. So that''s where A.A. Gill starts, going to find the home of everything.

A collection of dazzling travel pieces from SUNDAY TIMES journalist and critic A. A. GILL.From the moment he joined the SUNDAY TIMES, A.A. Gill has wanted to interview places - to discover the personality of a place as if it were a person, to listen and talk to it. A. A. GILL IS FURTHER AWAY is a wonderfully insightful and funny compendium of travel writing taken mostly from the SUNDAY TIMES, but also from GQ, TATLER and CONDE NAST TRAVELLER. Gill writes with a clarity and acerbity that conveys the intensity of his experiences in his travels around the world. His book includes essays on Sudan, India, Cuba, Germany and California. In each piece, there is a central image Gill uses as the key to unlocking the personality of a place.

''Theatre, food, refugees: in Adrian''s writing they''re all linked up ... If you haven''t read his book AA GILL IS AWAY, read it now. It was when he was away that he was at his best'' Stephen DaldryA. A. Gill was probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertained readers of the SUNDAY TIMES with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who objected to his opinions agree: his writing is hopelessly, painfully funny. He was one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it was always a disappointment when the words ''A.A. Gill is away'' appeared at the foot of his column. This book is the fruit of those absences: twenty-five long travel pieces that belie his reputation as a mere style-journalist and master of vitriol: this is travel writing of the highest quality and ambition.

Foreigner Adrian Gill (a Scot) goes in search of the essence of England and the EnglishThe English are naturally, congenitally, collectively and singularly, livid much of the time. In between the incoherent bellowing of the terraces and the pursed, rigid eye-rolling of the commuter carriage, they reach the end of their tethers and the thin end of their wedges. They''re incensed, incandescent, splenetic, prickly, touchy and fractious. They sit apart on their half of a damply disappointing little island, nursing and picking at their irritations.Perhaps aware that they''re living on top of a keg of fulminating fury, the English have, throughout their history, come up with hundreds of ingenious and bizarre ways to diffuse anger or transform it into something benign. Good manners and queues, roundabouts and garden sheds, and almost every game ever invented from tennis to bridge. They''ve built things, discovered stuff, made puddings, written hymns and novels, and for people who don''t like to talk much, they have come up with the most minutely nuanced and replete language ever spoken - just so there''ll be no misunderstandings. In this hugely witty, personal and readable book, A.A. Gill looks anger and the English straight in the eye.

The first collection of food writing by Britain''s funniest and most feared criticA.A. Gill knows food, and loves food. A meal is never just a meal. It has a past, a history, connotations. It is a metaphor for life. A.A. Gill delights in decoding what lies behind the food on our plates: famously, his reviews are as much ruminations on society at large as they are about the restaurants themselves. So alongside the concepts, customers and cuisines, ten years of writing about restaurants has yielded insights on everything from yaks to cowboys, picnics to politics.TABLE TALK is an idiosyncratic selection of A.A. Gill''s writing about food, taken from his Sunday Times and Tatler columns. Sometimes inspired by the traditions of a whole country, sometimes by a single ingredient, it is a celebration of what great eating can be, an excoriation of those who get it wrong, and an education about our own appetites. Because it spans a decade, the book focuses on A.A. Gill''s general dining experiences rather than individual restaurants - food fads, tipping, chefs, ingredients, eating in town and country and abroad, and the best and worst dining experiences. Fizzing with wit, it is a treat for gourmands, gourmets and anyone who relishes good writing.

The second collection of travel writing (and other essays) by Britain''s funniest and most feared critic.A.A. Gill is probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertains readers of the Sunday Times with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who want to hate him agree: A. A. Gill is hopelessly, painfully funny. He is one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it is always a disappointment when the words ''A. A. Gill is Away'' appear at the foot of his column. This second book is a further collection of those absences; 22 travel pieces and essays on other subjects that belie his reputation as a mere style journalist and master of vitriol. This is writing of the highest quality and ambition.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE''An intense, succulent read that''s intermittently dazzling'' THE TIMES''Chilling, exquisitely moving'' DAILY TELEGRAPH''A superb memoir - and one of the best books on addiction I have ever read'' EVENING STANDARDA. A. Gill''s memoir begins in the dark of a dormitory with six strangers. He is an alcoholic, dying in the last-chance saloon. He tells the truth - as far as he can remember it - about drinking and about what it is like to be drunk. He recalls the lost days, lost friends, failed marriages ... But there was also an ''optimum inebriation, a time when it was all golden''.Sobriety regained, there are painterly descriptions of people and places, unforgettable musings about childhood and family, art and religion; and most movingly, the connections between his cooking, dyslexia and his missing brother. Full of raw and unvarnished truths, exquisitely written throughout, POUR ME is about lost time and self-discovery. Lacerating, unflinching, uplifting, it is a classic about drunken abandon.

For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill''s columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. ''By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age'', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways.In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was ''a golden writer''. There was nothing that he couldn''t illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill''s journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.

A.A. Gill was an exceptional writer. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, he was always opinionated, always original, often surprising, and his writing illuminated every page. This second collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well-travelled and wrote ''abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great''. Far and Away is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - with the glitterati in St Tropez or in the ruins of earthquake-stricken Haiti - he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and we also join him at tables all around the globe. A.A. Gill had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is an opportunity to marvel at a master at work.