AA Gill: RIP

AA Gill, giant of journalism, dies aged 62

MY SUNDAY MORNING READ WILL NEVER BE THE SAME - R.I.P.

He confronted his cancer with characteristic verve and wit, but AA Gill, the award-winning Sunday Times writer and critic, died at Charing Cross Hospital in London yesterday, stunning his colleagues with the suddenness of his death.

Only a few days earlier, Gill, 62, had approved the final draft of what turned out to be his last article — an account of his search for a new treatment that might have extended his life. The feature, printed before he died, is published in The Sunday Times Magazine today.

His death robs British journalism of one of its most distinctive voices. “He was the heart and soul of the paper,” said Martin Ivens, editor of The Sunday Times. “His wit was incomparable, his writing was dazzling and fearless, his intelligence was matched by compassion. Adrian was a giant among journalists. He was also our friend. We will miss him.”

Jeremy Clarkson, his close friend, said: “The world is a massively less brilliant place today.”

Gill had announced his illness with typical elan in a review last month of a fish and chip shop in Whitby, North Yorkshire. “I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English,” he wrote. In his article published today, he describes his admiration for the NHS, even after he learnt that the revolutionary new drug his doctors were recommending was only available privately.

“I’ve led a middle-class, sheltered, uncombative, anti-violent life,” Gill wrote, “so I don’t know how this compares to other more manly men’s pain, but this is by miles and miles the worst thing I’ve ever been through, thank you for asking.”

The writer and critic’s death robs British journalism of one of its most distinctive voices

Goodnight, cheeky prince — what a silence you leave us

Funny, fearless, passionate. How we’ll miss him

AA Gill as a young man

We knew he was very ill but we didn’t expect to lose him so quickly. AA (Adrian) Gill succumbed to a brutal cancer just a few months after diagnosis. There have been many celebrity deaths this year but for The Sunday Times and for all our readers this one was very, very personal. We are all today in mourning — for him but also for ourselves, because we know there will never be another quite like him.

Adrian embodied the spirit and aspirations of our readers and this newspaper at their best — cheeky, passionate, funny, fearless, engaged, possessed of a lively conscience and a swaggering style. Whether writing about television, restaurants or royals, he brought colour, originality, wit and, when he wrote about refugees and the forgotten people of the earth, an intense and unyielding compassion.

His range was extraordinary. He was art school trained, not a conventional university man. Perhaps this is why the Adrian manner was always there. You always knew it was his voice and his characteristically strong, sensuous engagement with the world. So, when writing about migrants being smuggled into Mexico, he noted that the river, “broad and viscous, shimmies and curdles in clay-coloured swirls of sticks and dead stuff”. It could have been the soup in a really bad restaurant.

At Edinburgh castle in 1999

Then there was his suave, though never snobbish, tone. “Should you ever receive a gift from a Kalahari Bushman . . .” began one article. And, of the service at Tate Modern’s Switch House restaurant, he said it was “like the salt, velvety but rough”. He was the best possible guide, the ideal companion, making you laugh and wonder.

He was also a great reporter. He could empathise with anybody and anything. Even a herd of cows was not beyond or beneath him — “a collective of wide-hipped, large-breasted females, nurturing and fecund, nonjudgmental”. This was the kind of writing that makes you pause and look again at something so familiar that you had ceased to notice it.

But his brilliance was never remote or intimidating, never de haut en bas. If he affected a dandyish style, it was always to draw the readers in, not to keep them out. To this end, he never bent the knee to undeserving authority. Even the Michelin Guide, the sacred book of restaurant reviewers, failed to impress Adrian: “It has become a litany of places that most people who eat out a lot would actively avoid.”

Even when reviewing the fictionalised royal family in the TV series The Crown, he quite clearly intended to put the real one in its place — “a not very bright, frightened and stifled family, looking out at a world they don’t understand and don’t really like”.

His prose was a conspiracy with his readers. He loved them and they loved him back, not least because, like them, he landed himself in the odd fight. Berkshire folk were angered when he reviewed the Fat Duck restaurant at Bray. He was critical of their county. Adrian went back and did it again. He regularly did things like that; sometimes he went too far, but that is journalism.

Also, usually, his critical anger was underpinned by something higher, a kind of moral and social outrage, a loathing of pretension. “It has to tell you how good it feels about itself,” he said of one restaurant. “I counted 18 messages of corporate self-love. It was like being in a Methodist church that didn’t believe in God.”

Adrian did believe in God. He was an observant Anglican. This reinforced his care for the forgotten of the world — for the Rohingya people of Burma, the migrants in Mexico or on the Italian island of Lampedusa, for the trapped and despised in the Calais “Jungle”, where he heartbreakingly observed: “Every child in every refugee camp in the world wants to be a doctor. What they mean is they want to make things better.”

He was unsparingly honest about the alcoholism that nearly destroyed him before he quit at the age of 30, and about what were to be his final weeks of cancer treatment. Nothing more became the man than his announcement of his appalling condition in a review of a fish and chip shop. It was good manners to make light of his own impending death; we should all be so brave.

Dressed as the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima

Adrian’s life was incontrovertible evidence that well-written, deeply considered journalism is still and, with luck, will always be part of this nation’s lifeblood. He lived life with great intensity and he communicated that intensity to you, our readers. He could make us laugh so much we had to read him out loud at the breakfast table but he could make us share his anger at the world’s brutality and marvel at its wonders.

Only words can do this and, though we shall miss him, we know that Adrian’s words will long outlive us all.