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.

Serialized in Esquire, A.A. Gill's Pour Me a Life is a riveting meditation on the author's alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. “Pour Me a Life is an unapologet­ically honest, raw, and often har­rowing account of the life of a man who, up until now, we only thought we knew. Here is A.A. Gill at his best. A real-life Bright Lights, Big City.” —Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, and author of the New York Timesbestseller 32 Yolks Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, A.A. Gill’s Pour Me a Life is a riveting memoir of the author’s alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments in art, food, religion, and family that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. By his early twenties, at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s art school, journalist Adrian Gill was entrenched in alcoholism. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pock­ets that “were like tiny crime scenes,” helping him puzzle his whereabouts back together. Through­out his recollections, Gill traces his childhood, his early diagnosis of dyslexia, the deep sense of isolation when he was sent to boarding school at age eleven, the disappearance of his only brother, whom he has not seen for decades. When Gill was confronted at age thirty by a doctor who questioned his drinking, he answered honestly for the first time, not because he was ready to stop, but because his body was too dam­aged to live much longer. Gill was admitted to a thirty-day rehab center—then a rare and revolu­tionary concept in England—and has lived three decades of his life sober. Written with clear-eyed honesty and empathy, Pour Me a Life is a haunting account of addiction, its exhilarating power and destructive force, and is destined to be a classic of its kind.

Critic, essayist and cultural savant A.A. Gill is probably the most widely read columnist in Britain. His books The Angry Island and A.A. Gill is away have found delighted fans in America as well, and sparked a loyal following. His new book of travel essays, Previous Convictions, ranges from Gill's nearby domestic locales of Glastonbury and the English countryside to Haiti, Guatemala, Pakistan and exotic, dangerous, downtown Manhattan. In this collection of notes from the corners of the globe, and sometimes from the edge of sanity, he confesses about his travels far and wide, "The more I see of the world, the less I think I understand. Familiarity breeds even more astonishment. The world just gets wider and deeper and weirder." These pieces are wickedly funny, sometimes pointedly -- even purposely -- critical of many cultures and traditions, and always edifying and enchanting. As an adventurer and as a writer, Gill never disappoints; while he may take others to task for their customs, habits, idiosyncrasies and plain bad taste, his own indefatigable curiosity keeps him going back again and again for more, and provides us with spectacular entertainment along the way.

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.

A.A. Gill's writing: an embarrassment of riches. This selection of some of his recent pieces, spanning the last five years, sees him at his most perceptive, brilliant and funny. His subjects range from the controversial - fur - to the heartfelt - a fantastic crystallisation of what it means to be European. He tackles life drawing, designs his own tweed, considers boyhood through the prism of the Museum of Childhood and spends a day at Donald Trump's university. His award-winningly acerbic review of Morrissey's autobiography sits alongside the insight he brings to the work of Rudyard Kipling, Don McCullin and Lord Snowdon. And he turns that insight on himself in the terrific article "Life at Sixty"

AA 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 AA 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. Reality TV is the exception; it's a tiny proportion of television's output. Most of broadcasting tells you things, and it's TV's great gift to impart information. The real criticism should be that it doesn't differentiate enough. It doesn't know the value of the stuff it pours out in a constant warm stream. We absorb what's useful and interesting. 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. There are obvious individual examples: 'Cathy Come Home'; the newsreel of the Vietnam war in America; the Ethiopian famine. And television has utterly changed sport. Do you imagine there'd be anything like this fuss over an Olympics bid if it was only going to be shown on Pathe newsreel? Charities and pressure groups, from pillar-box conservation to animal welfare and cancer research, glean power and funds from tiny exposures on the box. It can bring down walls, save lives and right wrongs. It can also tell you how to put a water feature on your patio..."

The first collection of food writing by Britain's funniest and most feared critic A.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.