THE BEST OF AA GILL

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 416pp, £20, Oldie price £14.44 inc p&p The death of the journalist AA Gill at the end of 2016 came as a shock to his many admirers even though he had revealed his cancer diagnosis – ‘an embarrassment of cancer – the full English’ – in his Sunday Times column just three weeks before.

This latest selection of his journalism follows hard on the heels of an earlier volume, Lines in the

Sand; and in the Spectator, his former wife, the writer Cressida Connolly, paid touching tribute to Gill: ‘People – even people who had never met him – felt they’d lost their funniest, most outrageous chum. Opening a paper without an article by him is like going to your store cupboard and finding that there’s no chilli or salt: everything is blander without him. Two collections which came out this year, Lines in the Sand and The Best of AA Gill, showcase him at his finest. Adrian showed incredible courage, wit and generosity of heart during his final weeks. Once my husband, always my friend, he is irreplaceable, on and off the page.’

Reviewing The Best of AA Gill in the Times, Roger Lewis noted that Gill’s severe dyslexia meant that his weekly columns were dictated – this gave his prose its distinctively baroque savour: ‘Gill was like a fruity actor, preening and posturing in the limelight, or as he’d have put it, “yearning and longing, exclaiming and declaiming, biding and abiding”.’

In the Express, Mernie Gilmore found Gill’s writing ‘breathtakingly rude, sharply perceptive and brilliantly funny all at once’. She quoted a particularly characteristic description of dinner parties: ‘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.’