More matter with less art

When A.A. Gill died last December, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth across the nation. I must admit this came as a surprise to me, but then I hadn’t read him for many years, having developed a ferocious dislike for the Sunday Times too long ago now to remember quite why. My memories of him were of an outrageous show pony, a wordsmith of great talent but surprisingly little taste, who essentially wrote about himself and his wonderful life (in the guise of restaurant and television reviews) in a needy, look-at-me, sub-Clarkson kind of way. He seemed to me to encapsulate everything that was wrong with the paper he wrote for, whatever that turns out to have been.

But people were genuinely upset when he died, and not just because he was by all accounts a good egg. I suspect this is because humorous writers are much more loved by readers than editors ever suspect. When Miles Kington died in 2008, staff at the Independent were shocked by the intensity of their readers’ reaction. To them Kington had just been this bloke who filled up a corner of the paper every day. But some people, it turned out, had been buying the paper purely to read the funny man. I’m sure the same was true of Gill. Such writers are devilishly hard to replace.

Before he croaked, Gill put together this selection of articles, which covers the last five years of his career. The subtitle is deceptive. So much did the poor man have to write that a Collected Journalism would weigh several tons and be transportable only by pantechnicon. This is a more manageable volume altogether. It’s split into three sections: ‘Lines in the Sand’, which collects his various pieces about refugees; ‘Out There’, which are mainly travel pieces; and ‘In Here’, which are more personal pieces.