A much-missed wordsmith who set the world to rights

THE BEST OF AA GILL by AA Gill W&N, £20

WHEN AA Gill told the world he had cancer, he did so in his own inimitable style in the Sunday restaurant review column he had written since 1993.

“I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer,” he wrote, “the full English... a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.” Even when talking about the illness that would kill him, he couldn’t resist a witty, wordy metaphor to make his case.

He died aged just 62 but left hundreds of thousands of words behind. He was best known for his excoriating restaurant reviews but could turn his hand to anything, as a new collection of his writing proves.

The Best Of AA Gill was compiled by his long-time editor Celia Hayley who has divided his work into four different areas: travel, TV, general pieces and of course food, which is the book’s starting point.

“A food critic really only needs two things in order to do his job properly: no eating disorders and the gastric morals of a hooker with a mortgage. You gotta eat everything,” he remarks.

And he does, hoovering up such delights as year-old buried shark (“the flavour of ammonia so strong you can taste it behind your eyeballs”), a hard-boiled fertilised duck egg and a bowl of still-warm cow’s blood, freshly tapped from the animal’s jugular vein.

But of course Gill’s writing isn’t just about the food.

In fact, his reviews were famous for their introductions where he would cast his withering gaze over whatever took his fancy, before finally getting down to what he had actually had to eat.

In this new collection, dinner parties are first in line for a filleting. They are “the work of the devil, the dark side of honest supper, twisting the feeding of family and friends to malevolence by snobbery, etiquette, envy and pomp… They usurp the most basic human goodness of hospitality and succour and turn it into a homunculus of social climbing”.

Vegetarians are in for a similar mauling (“Vegetarian cooking is… unremittingly vile.