Far and Away

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1474617395
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
A.A. Gill was an exceptional writer. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, he was always opinionated, always original, often surprising, and his writing illuminated every page. This second collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well-travelled and wrote 'abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great'. Far and Away is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - with the glitterati in St Tropez or in the ruins of earthquake-stricken Haiti - he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and we also join him at tables all around the globe. A.A. Gill had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is an opportunity to marvel at a master at work.

The Best of A. A. Gill

Author: Adrian Gill
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474607759
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
For over twenty years, people turned to A. A. Gill's columns every Sunday - for his fearlessness, his perception, and the laughter-and-tear-provoking one-liners - but mostly because he was the best. 'By miles the most brilliant journalist of our age', as Lynn Barber put it. This is the definitive collection of a voice that was silenced too early but that can still make us look at the world in new and surprising ways. In the words of Andrew Marr, A.. A. Gill was 'a golden writer'. There was nothing that he couldn't illuminate with his dazzling prose. Wherever he was - at home or abroad - he found the human story, brought it to vivid life, and rendered it with fierce honesty and bracing compassion. And he was just as truthful about himself. There have been various collections of A. A. Gill's journalism - individual compilations of his restaurant and TV criticism, of his travel writing and his extraordinary feature articles. This book showcasesthe very best of his work: the peerlessly funny criticism, the extraordinarily knowledgeable food writing, assignments throughout the world, and reflections on life, love, and death. Drawn from a range of publications, including the Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, Tatler and Australian Gourmet Traveller, The Ivy Cookbook and his books on England and America, it is by turns hilarious, uplifting, controversial, unflinching, sad, funny and furious.

Pour Me, a Life

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 039957493X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Serialized in Esquire, A.A. Gill's Pour Me a Life is a riveting meditation on the author's alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. “Pour Me a Life is an unapologetically honest, raw, and often harrowing account of the life of a man who, up until now, we only thought we knew. Here is A.A. Gill at his best. A real-life Bright Lights, Big City.” —Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, and author of the New York Timesbestseller 32 Yolks Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, A.A. Gill’s Pour Me a Life is a riveting memoir of the author’s alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments in art, food, religion, and family that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. By his early twenties, at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s art school, journalist Adrian Gill was entrenched in alcoholism. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that “were like tiny crime scenes,” helping him puzzle his whereabouts back together. Throughout his recollections, Gill traces his childhood, his early diagnosis of dyslexia, the deep sense of isolation when he was sent to boarding school at age eleven, the disappearance of his only brother, whom he has not seen for decades. When Gill was confronted at age thirty by a doctor who questioned his drinking, he answered honestly for the first time, not because he was ready to stop, but because his body was too damaged to live much longer. Gill was admitted to a thirty-day rehab center—then a rare and revolutionary concept in England—and has lived three decades of his life sober. Written with clear-eyed honesty and empathy, Pour Me a Life is a haunting account of addiction, its exhilarating power and destructive force, and is destined to be a classic of its kind.

To America with Love

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416596216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair columnist serves up an “immensely entertaining book inspired by his love and knowledge of America” (Sunday Times, London). IN TO AMERICA WITH LOVE, celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair columnist A. A. Gill traverses the Atlantic to become the freshest chronicler of American identity in recent memory. With a fiery temper, a sharp-tongued wit, and an insatiable curiosity to figure out what makes more than 300 million of the world’s population tick, Gill traces the history and logic of our nation’s habits, collecting wild stories and startling facts along the way. From Colorado, where he meets a local vegetation expert and learns which flowers were in Pocahontas’s nuptial bouquet, to Kentucky, where he visits the Creationist Museum and drinks moonshine with a hog farmer, and to Harlem, where he misses a turn and stumbles into the wrong barbershop for a once-in-a-lifetime haircut, Gill embarks on a tour of not only the nation’s landscape but also its psyche, playing adventurer, philosopher, statistician, and raconteur all at once. In inimitable fashion he explains why pressing a button in a Manhattan elevator means entering a social contract of American etiquette and inverting conventional hierarchies of space; why browsing through Playboy centerfolds becomes the perfect litmus test for a generation’s political views; and how Hollywood is the metaphysical marketplace for movies, the place where Americans are sold on American romance and taught how to dream the American dream. Weaving together a tapestry of historical erudition and outrageous anecdotes, Gill ultimately captures the scope and spirit of a nation that started off as a conceptual experiment and became a political, scientific, and cultural fortress. This humorous and revelatory book shows us why we are who we are by transforming ordinary experiences into extraordinary lessons and promising to never let us look in the mirror the same way again.

AA Gill is Away

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416548181
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
A. A. Gill is one of the most feared writers in London, noted--according to the New York Times--for his "rapier wit." Some even consider the mere assignment of a subject to Gill a hostile act. But when the notice "AA GILL IS AWAY" runs in the Sunday Times of London, the city can rest peacefully in the knowledge that the writer is off traveling. "My editor asked me what I wanted from journalism and I said the first thing that came into my head--I'd like to interview places. To treat a place as if it were a person, to go and listen to it, ask it questions, observe it the way you would interview a politician or a pop star," Gill writes. Upon his return, readers are treated to an account of his vacations to places like famine-stricken Sudan, the pornography studios of California's San Fernando Valley, the dying Aral Sea or the seedy parts of Kaliningrad. The result is one of the most fascinating, stylish and irreverent collections of travel writing.

Wild Wings

Author: Gill Lewis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442414499
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
This “vividly imagined and well-written novel” (Booklist, starred review) tells a gripping story about a boy from Scotland and a girl from West Africa who join together to save a migrating Osprey—and end up saving each other. When Callum spots crazy Iona McNair on his family’s sprawling property, she’s catching a fish with her bare hands. She won’t share the fish, but does share something else: a secret. She’s discovered a rare endangered bird, an Osprey, and it’s clear to both her and Callum that if anyone finds out about the bird, it, and its species, is likely doomed. Poachers, egg thieves, and wild weather are just some of the threats, so Iona and Callum vow to keep track of the bird and check her migratory progress using the code a preservationist tagged on her ankle, no matter what. But when one of them can no longer keep the promise, it’s up to the other to do it for them both. No matter what. Set against the dramatic landscapes of Scotland and West Africa, this is a story of unlikely friendships, the wonders of the wild—and the everyday leaps of faith that set our souls to flight.

Table Talk

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297864696
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
The first collection of food writing by Britain's funniest and most feared critic A.A. Gill knows food, and loves food. A meal is never just a meal. It has a past, a history, connotations. It is a metaphor for life. A.A. Gill delights in decoding what lies behind the food on our plates: famously, his reviews are as much ruminations on society at large as they are about the restaurants themselves. So alongside the concepts, customers and cuisines, ten years of writing about restaurants has yielded insights on everything from yaks to cowboys, picnics to politics. TABLE TALK is an idiosyncratic selection of A.A. Gill's writing about food, taken from his Sunday Times and Tatler columns. Sometimes inspired by the traditions of a whole country, sometimes by a single ingredient, it is a celebration of what great eating can be, an excoriation of those who get it wrong, and an education about our own appetites. Because it spans a decade, the book focuses on A.A. Gill's general dining experiences rather than individual restaurants - food fads, tipping, chefs, ingredients, eating in town and country and abroad, and the best and worst dining experiences. Fizzing with wit, it is a treat for gourmands, gourmets and anyone who relishes good writing.

Lines in the Sand

Author: A. A. Gill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474605151
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A.A. Gill's writing: an embarrassment of riches. This selection of some of his recent pieces, spanning the last five years, sees him at his most perceptive, brilliant and funny. His subjects range from the controversial - fur - to the heartfelt - a fantastic crystallisation of what it means to be European. He tackles life drawing, designs his own tweed, considers boyhood through the prism of the Museum of Childhood and spends a day at Donald Trump's university. His award-winningly acerbic review of Morrissey's autobiography sits alongside the insight he brings to the work of Rudyard Kipling, Don McCullin and Lord Snowdon. And he turns that insight on himself in the terrific article "Life at Sixty"

The Angry Island

Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416545603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Think of England, and anger hardly springs to mind as its primary national characteristic. Yet in The Angry Island, A. A. Gill argues that, in fact, it is plain old fury that is the wellspring for England's accomplishments. The default setting of England is anger. The English are naturally, congenitally, collectively and singularly livid much of the time. They're incensed, incandescent, splenetic, prickly, touchy, and fractious. They can be mildly annoyed, really annoyed and, most scarily, not remotely annoyed. They sit apart on their half of a damply disappointing little island, nursing and picking at their irritations. The English itch inside their own skins. They feel foreign in their own country and run naked through their own heads. Perhaps aware that they're living on top of a keg of fulminating fury, the English have, throughout their history, come up with hundreds of ingenious and bizarre ways to diffuse anger or transform it into something benign. Good manners and queues, cul-de-sacs and garden sheds, and almost every game ever invented from tennis to bridge. They've built things, discovered stuff, made puddings, written hymns and novels, and for people who don't like to talk much, they have come up with the most minutely nuanced and replete language ever spoken -- just so there'll be no misunderstandings. The Angry Island by turns attacks and praises the English, bringing up numerous points of debate for Anglophiles and anyone who wonders about the origins of national identity. This book hunts down the causes and the results of being the Angry Island.

There is Another Way

Author: Ian Gilbert
Publisher: Crown House Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1781352380
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Edited by Ian Gilbert with chapters by Mark Anderson, Lisa Jane Ashes, Phil Beadle, Jackie Beere, David Cameron (The Real David Cameron), Paul Clarke, Tait Coles, Mark Creasy, Mark Finnis, Dave Harris, Crista Hazell, Martin Illingworth, Nina Jackson, Rachel Jones, Gill Kelly, Debra Kidd, Jonathan Lear, Trisha Lee, Roy Leighton, Matthew McFall, Sarah Pavey, Simon Pridham, Jim Roberson, Hywel Roberts, Martin Robinson, Bethan Stracy-Burbridge, Dave Whitaker, Phil Wood. We are living at a time when loud voices from inside and outside the profession are telling teachers and school leaders 'this' is the way education should be done. This is how you should lead a school. This is how you should manage a class. This is how children should learn. This is what you should do to make children behave. These messages are given as if there is only one way to achieve these things their way. However, with decades of experience working in all types of school around the globe, the many associates of Independent Thinking know there is always another way. This book is for educators everywhere who are hearing these loud voices yet who know that children deserve something better. Full of inspiration and ideas for how to achieve just that, There is Another Way is a call to action to swim against the tide and reclaim the heart of education. All of the royalties from sales of this book will go to the Big i Foundation.