A. A. (Adrian Anthony) Gill (born June 28, 1954) is a British newspaper columnist and writer. He is also restaurant reviewer in the Style section of the London Sunday Times, and a television critic in the Culture section in the same paper. His reviews are famously short on detail about the food itself. ^*

He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Art. He has a long-term relationship with Nicola Formby, who appears in his columns as "The Blonde".

He was once famously ejected from Gordon Ramsay's restaurant along with his dining partner Joan Collins. Ramsay's reason was that Gill had written a review of his restaurant that covered his personal life more than the food.

Quotes

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Gill is notorious for his acerbic, provocative style, on one occasion in 1997 damaging his career by describing the Welsh as:

"loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls,"

While two years later he angered Germans with an article called "Hunforgiven" ^*, making numerous references to their Nazi past. In 2004, when writing about the ITV drama Island at War, based on the German occupation of Jersey and Guernsey, he asked:

"What have the Channel Islands ever done for us? A couple of really expensive potatoes, a few flowers and fatty milk."

His comments were widely condemned in the islands as offensive and inaccurate ^*.

On being mistaken for an Englishman he stated:

I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to: the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.

The truth is — and perhaps this is a little unworthy, a bit shameful — I find England and the English embarrassing. Fundamentally toe-curlingly embarrassing. And even though I look like one, sound like one, can imitate the social/mating behaviour of one, I’m not one. I always bridle with irritation when taken for an Englishman, and fill in those disembarkation cards by pedantically writing “Scots” in the appropriate box (The Angry Island).

Many of his articles can be found on the travel writing and hotel revewing website he founded in 2000, http://www.travelintelligence.net - see http://www.travelintelligence.net/php/writers/writ.php?id=22

Bibliography

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• Sap Rising (1997)
• Ivy Cookbook (1999) co-author
• Starcrossed (1999)
• AA Gill is Away (2003) collection of travel writing. ISBN 0753816814
• The Angry Island (2005) a book about England and the English. ISBN 0297843184

1954 births | Living people