(p. A29) A. A. Gill, an essayist and cultural critic whose stylishly malicious restaurant reviews for The Sunday Times made him one of Britain’s most celebrated journalists, died on Saturday [December 7, 2016] in London. He was 62.
Martin Ivens, the editor of The Sunday Times, announced the death, calling Mr. Gill “the heart and soul of the paper.” The cause was lung cancer.
. . .
In a long article published Sunday [December 8, 2016], after his death, Mr. Gill wrote, without rancor, that Britain’s National Health Service had refused to pay for immunotherapy that he said might have extended his life.
. . .
As a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he dismissed the pâté at the beloved Paris bistro L’Ami Louis as tasting like “pressed liposuction.” The shrimp and foie gras dumplings at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian restaurant 66, in Manhattan, were “fishy liver-filled condoms,” he wrote, “with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”
Vituperation was not his only mode. He could praise. He could turn an elegant phrase and toss off a pithy bon mot. “America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth,” he wrote in “The Golden Door: Letters to America” (2012), published in the United States in 2013 as “To America With Love.”
. . .
“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”
For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “A. A. Gill Dies at 62; Skewered Britain’s Restaurants.” The New York Times (Tues., DEC. 13, 2016): A29.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date DEC. 12, 2016, and has the title “A. A. Gill, Who Gleefully Skewered Britain’s Restaurants, Dies at 62.”)
Gill’s book praising America, is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.