A. A. Gill Books

"For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners, but mostly because he was the best. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism, but there is no one volume that captures the whole range of his writing. This book encapsulates some of the very best of his work... Drawn from a range of publications, including The Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Best of A. A. Gill is by turns controversial, uplifting, unflinching, sad, funny and furious"--Cover.

A satire of manners about a garden in a West London square and the unlikely members of its garden committee.

The 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, AA Gill looks anger and the English straight in the eye.

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 from the page.This book, the second posthumous collection of his journalism, brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well travelled, and once wrote that for all our ability to cross the world at will, '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'. This is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - in London or the Kalahari, Benidorm or Beirut, with the glitterati in St Tropez or the nightclubs of Moscow, in the ruins of earthquake-struck Haiti or in a camp with the displaced Rohingya, he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and so we also get to join him at tables all around the world, from a motorway service station cafe to the sophisticated delights of El Bulli. Fearless in his judgement, often provocative, and endlessly thought-provoking, he had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is another opportunity to marvel at a master at work.