Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism

by A.A. Gill

A. A. Gill's writing: an embarrassment of riches. This latest selection 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 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 P. G. Wodehouse. And he turns that insight on himself in the terrific article 'Life at Sixty'.

There are pieces from all corners of the world: from the tragic and terrifying Triangle of Death in the Congo to the dangers of the Mexican migrant journey. He has adventures with porcupine pluckers in Botswana and returns to his roots in Scotland. He forages for bush tucker in Australia and for high culture in Ravenna. He reports from the roof of the world in Bhutan, and the rather more earthbound drunk tanks of Humberside. He meets the stateless - the Muslim Rohingyas exiled from Burma; and the homeless in a moving and humane account of a shelter in central London.

A recurring theme emerges in the overwhelming story of our times: the refugee crisis. In the last few years A. A. Gill has given us both its human face and its appalling context. He has travelled to Lampedusa to meet the Africans desperately trying to reach Europe, visited the Calais Jungle as well as Syrian refugees in the Lebanon, and met the migrants on the vast and hazardous journey from Kos through the Balkans. The resulting articles are journalism at its finest and fiercest.

Genres: Nonfiction, Journalism, Essays, Travel, Food

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 9, 2017

About the author

Adrian Anthony Gill was an English journalist. He was the author of 9 books, including The Angry Island. He was the TV and restaurant critic and a regular features writer for The Sunday Times, a columnist for Esquire, and a contributor to Vanity Fair. He lived in London.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection from one of Britain's great journalists, sadly no longer with us.

I first came to A A Gill in the 1990's, absorbing his acerbic and laugh-out-loud restaurant reviews for The Times, leavened with regular weightier fare. Once discovered, he was a must-read correspondent.

The first collection in Lines In the Sand provides visceral and challenging first hand accounts of visits to the refugee camps and war-torn corners of the globe, many far from the headlines. Personal, memorable and searing - A A Gill doesn't hold back.

The other collections in the book rarely miss a beat too, awakening emotion, memory and the bitter sweet realisation that the author's passing has robbed us of one of the most original and insightful scribes of our generation.

[Xenia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that even people who don't like books can love.
I am recommending this book to everyone. The first 5 star rating I truly stand behind.
My general preference has always been fiction, so when I was given this book as a gift, I really didn't care to read it. Real life? Journalism? Opposite of what I like, hate it. Glad lockdown came around and inspired me to try a different kind of book.
I had never heard of A. A. Gill, never read any of his writing, but after reading the first piece in this book I couldn't stop. Maybe one article a day, sometimes four, often none. This book is like seeing a friend that is everywhere, all the time, and they're catching you up on their latest trip with outrageous remarks and surprising points of focus. Never boring, always ending when you want more, which in truth, is how we like it.
This book isn't wanky, Gill's writing is smart and informed without making you feel stupid when you have to look up 5-8 words per article. I feel like I got to know who he was (as much as he put himself into his writing) which led to me shedding some tears when I got to 'The Magpie Cafe' & 'My National Health Crisis'. (Even knowing about the end of his life, it's still weirdly surprising).
I will keep this on my shelf, I will re-read it in parts, wholly, again and again.

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The broad, brown, bloated Dungu River slips with a clotted lethargy through the silent bush, as if it were too hot and humid to do anything more than roll over and float past the mango trees, where squadrons of bright ibis squabble over nothing. The still air begins to collate clouds for the afternoon deluge; the temperature trudges up with a practised ennui. It is the end of the rainy season."

As a writer, A.A. Gill was without peer. This last collection of essays demonstrates Gill's absolute grasp of humanity, his sharp wit and his unending compassion. The first section of essays on refugees is some of the most moving and insightful writing I've read, ever.

A voice that will be sorely missed.

[Ben Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is AA Gill at his best, but with more heart and less snark than normal, because of the awful thing that comes at the end. And the opening articles are some of the best I have read about refugees anywhere. He makes you want to be more curious, humane and embracing of all experiences and relationships.

[Nevena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection of writing from a man who really lived and understood humanity. Sadly missed.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the thinking and the writing. Such a sad loss to the community of lucid clear challenging thinkers. I recommend you read this book and then challenge you to an action after being inspired.

[Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels odd to call this the “final” collection of A.A. Gill pieces, since he wrote a lot of stuff in his life and his estate and publishers will doubtless be putting out various bundles for years to come, but this is a collection of some of the columns he wrote in the years before his sudden death of pancreatic cancer, aged 62, in December 2016; an untimely passing and quite genuinely society’s loss.

Gill was disliked in a lot of left-wing circles because he was a rich toff who often said witty but offensive things, went on gourmet travel expeditions and hunting safaris, married Amber Rudd and once shot a baboon. Nobody who has actually read any of the man’s writing or opinions could dismiss him on such second-hand impressions. The enemy of the people that exists in the mind of Guardian commenters would not have dedicated a huge amount of his journalism in the 2010s to the plight of refugees, which makes up the first third of Lines in the Sand. In a confronting series of pieces he travels from from the vast UNHCR camps in Jordan…

This isn’t a salvation, it’s not a new start, it’s not a lucky escape when a man, a widow, a family, a village are forced to make the choice to become refugees. It is an unconditional surrender, not just of the house you live in or your profession, but of your security, community, your web of friendships, your dignity, your respect, your history and your future – not just yours, your children’s future. The middle-aged man is never going to get his grocery shop back; the mechanic is never going to return to servicing Mercedes… A refugee camp is a community with everything good and hopeful and comforting about community taken out. There is precious little peace, no belonging, no civic pride.

…to the Rohingyas exiled from Burma into Bangladesh…

Not only is this the worst, it is the least known and reported pogrom in the world today. Compared to all the other degrading and murderous bullying on Earth, this has one startling and contrary ingredient: the Rohingya are Muslim, the Burmese are Buddhist. The gravest, cruellest state-sponsored persecution of any people anywhere is being practised by pacifist Buddhists on jihadi-mad, sharia-loving Muslims. It doesn’t really fit in with the received wisdom of how the world works. The Burmese say the Rohingyas are dogs, filth, less than human, that they are too ugly to be Burmese, that they are a stain, a racial insult, and that, anyway, they are Bengali – illegally imported coolie immigrants, colonial flotsam.

…to the huge numbers of Syrians and Iraqis who fled into eastern Europe in the early 2010s:

The truth of this exodus is that those who steeple their fingers and shake their heads and claim to have clear and sensible, firm but fair, arm’s-length solutions to all of this have not met a refugee. It is only possible to put up the no-vacancy sign if you don’t see who’s knocking at the door. For most of us it’s simple. We couldn’t stand face-to-face with our neighbours and say: “I feel no obligation to help.” None of you would sit opposite a stricken, bereft, lonely, 22-year-old gay man and say: “Sorry, son, you’re on your own.” Or not take in a young poet and his delicate Juliet and their awkward, gooseberry friend. The one thing the refugees and the Europeans agree on is that Europe is a place of freedom, fairness and safety. It turns out that one of us is mistaken and the other is lying.

The remainder of the book is a collection of Gill’s typically perceptive and peripatetic pieces on any number of subjects, ranging from parenting to Rudyard Kipling to the humble joy of train travel. But as a politically-minded person I found his insights on politics by far the most interesting. On the Scottish independence referendum of 2014:

I should come clean and declare that if I had a vote, I would vote for independence in a heartbeat, and if Scots take what is theirs I’ll be the first in the queue for a passport. But like all expats I do not have a vote, and our view looking back is more tweedy and heathery and smells more of shortbread than that of people who have to live there. I do know that making a nation is more than just your pension and your water rates, your fear about a currency and whether or not you’ll be able to get the BBC. A country isn’t just for life, it’s for all the lives to come, and the final lesson from history is not actually Scots, but from just over the way.

Ireland had a far more fraught and aggressive struggle for independence. They did not have oil and they don’t even have a fishing fleet, they’ve got second-rate whiskey and tweed and, finally, they gained a grudging and penurious independence without the EU, with a currency that was tied to the pound, and they immediately fell into a vicious civil war and then a depression. The new Eire had precious little goodwill from London or the continent. The Republic will be 100 years old in eight years, and if they had a referendum and were asked “Look, you’ve had a century of this, wouldn’t you rather come back and be part of the UK again?” do you imagine there would be a single vote for yes? Because whatever happens, it is always better to be yourself.

To Brexit:

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

To an appraisal of the people attending a Trump “University” convention in 2009:

Their battered faces didn’t smile a lot. They were weather-proofed for disappointment. They were the Americans we never see in Europe, the ones who don’t travel. They are the children and grandchildren of immigrants for whom the American dream reneged and passed over to others. What none of us knew was that seven years later there would be a collective name for all these people: Trump voters.
…
The millions of Americans who now vote for Trump are an unpalatable, embarrassing and inexplicable mystery to the Americans who wouldn’t consider voting for him, as they are to everyone watching from the bleachers of the rest of the world. But they were and are the natural consequence of a society that lauds and mythologises winners. The non-winners don’t just go away to be good, acquiescent losers; they get furious and bitter, and they blame the rules and the establishment referee, and they want comeuppance, someone to blame, and they attach themselves to the biggest, flashiest, self-proclaimed carnival-headed winner out there.

And then, finally, to his sudden diagnosis of cancer in 2016, and his final weeks in the NHS:

We know it’s the best of us. The National Health Service is the best of us. You can’t walk into an NHS hospital and be a racist. That condition is cured instantly. But it’s almost impossible to walk into a private hospital and not fleetingly feel that you are one: a plush waiting room with entitled and bad-tempered health tourists.

You can’t be sexist on the NHS, nor patronising, and the care and the humour, the togetherness ranged against the teetering, chronic system by both the caring and the careworn is the Blitz, “back against the wall,” stern and sentimental best of us — and so we tell lies about it.

We say it’s the envy of the world. It isn’t. We say there’s nothing else like it. There is. We say it’s the best in the West. It’s not. We think it’s the cheapest. It isn’t. Either that or we think it’s the most expensive — it’s not that, either. You will live longer in France and Germany, get treated faster and more comfortably in Scandinavia, and everything costs more in America.

…

Why is our reaction to cancer so medieval, so wrapped in fortune-cookie runes and votive memory shards, like the teeth and metatarsals of dead saints? Cancer is frightening. One in two of us will get it. It has dark memories, unmentionably euphemised. In the public eye, not all cancers are equal. There is little sympathy for lung cancer. It’s mostly men, mostly old men, mostly working-class old men and mostly smokers. There is a lot more money and public sympathy for the cancers that affect women and the young. Why wouldn’t there be?

“How do men react when you tell them their cancers are fatal?” I ask Dr Lewanski.

“Always the same way — with stoicism.”

“Bollocks,” I think. “I thought that was just me.”

Gill’s writing – perhaps minus the emotionally draining catalogue of human misery that makes up the refugee pieces at the beginning of Lines in the Sand – has always made me happy, in some ineffable way. It makes me want to view the world with different eyes. He may have been privileged and wealthy, but he’s someone you instinctively feel would have lived a full and rewarding life regardless of his station in it; a man who enjoyed both the finer things and the simpler pleasures; a writer able to pen a column with astute articulations of a major political issue or with an ode to the pleasure of seaside fish and chips, and devote equal panache and vitality to both. 62 is unacceptably young, but if I’m unfortunate enough to depart this world that early, I hope I’ll be able to look back and say I valued it as much as A.A. Gill did.

[Viv Edwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cant believe I hadnt read this till now. The late Mr. Gill definitely delivers another journalistic treat for us all. If you liked any of his other entries, you will seriously enjoy reading this.

[Ugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gill was a national treasure: funny, insightful, courageous without being contrarian. We're less without him. This book contains his own selection of some of his best journalism, covering refugees, travel, and national miscellany - picked somewhat hurriedly, presumably, in the final days of his wrenchingly rapid demise. It doesn't achieve genius quite so often as The Golden Door, Gill's peon to America, but pieces on Europe and my home town of Grimsby / Cleethorpes are about as good as you could ever wish to read. The lack of a fifth star is purely due to the book's relatively slim size: Gill fans will want a more comprehensive compendium, including the best of his TV and restaurant criticism too.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars!

“They were mostly late-middle aged and disaffected. They looked older than their clothes implied. Thinning hair and sallow skin: a lack of care that implied avoiding mirrors was cheaper than getting a facial or a haircut. Most came with bags and rucksacks. They were prepared for a long day: Tupperware boxes of cold pizza, orgies or bologna sandwiches, thermoses of fruit tea and bottles of soda. They trailed collapsible hip-support walking sticks, lumbar cushions and braces to abseil trousers over avalanching stomachs. They suffered from all the conditions of early ageing and bad diet, low maintenance and self-loathing: wobbly gait, thick ankles, bad joints, fat and grunting.”

This is Gill’s rather colourful and extensive description of the people who surrounded him as he attended Trump University back in 2009. This is just one of the many instances in this collection where he really hits the mark and captures the feel of the time and place. Elsewhere he finds himself in even darker places, like the war ridden Congo, where unimaginable horrors occur on a daily basis, or the displaced Rohingyas enduring life in a refugee camp for more than twenty years in Bangladesh. Then there are the many hundreds of thousand refugees, who wash up in Lebanon and Jordan.

He also gets to flex his political muscles on issues closer to home in meaty subjects such as the Scottish referendum, (he was a YES man) and Brexit, (he was a NO man), which make for fine reading. He sets foot in many other places as diverse as Colombia and Kangaroo Island to Humberside and Whitby, with his trademark take on their respective pros and cons. His piece on Trieste is easily up there with some of the best short works he has ever written.

Again like most of his anthologies he veers freely between plummy and pompous to earnestly humane and sympathetic. Though even Gill has his dull moments, like his trip to Bhutan, which had no spark about it at all, but nevertheless this is another exceptional collection from the late journalist, even when he’s talking absolute rubbish, such as describing the Trans-Siberian as “A week of mind-numbing boredom with the endless steppe to nowhere.” or indulging in shameless product promotion, the depth and breadth of his knowledge and learning always make for utterly compelling and rewarding reading.

[Jonathan Corfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The neighbours are having a party next door. There's the usual music, the tones of toxic masculinity jabbering and boorishly making itself heard. Some girls are demanding the music is changed to something their parents listened to 30 years ago and at the halftime break in the rugby game I'm half-watching I've just read AA Gill's last column where he is admitted to hospital in unbearable pain, just days from succumbing to a raft of cancers.

I've written before that AA Gill is probably the greatest journalist or writer of his generation. It was his dyslexia that made him so good.
You see every word that appeared in print was spoken to an amanuensis who put those words on a page for publication in Britain's greatest papers and magazines. He wrote in his own voice. He wrote restaurant reviews, war correspondence, travel writing and interviews of such insight, with a command of language that is seldom challenged and even if you didn't agree with his opinions you had to read what he thought so you could re-evaluate your own opinion. AA Gill wrote in a way that stopped you from putting down your paper or book and moving on from what you had to do next.
What you had to do was take a moment and digest what you had just read.
He had the gift of a cultured world view, a noteworthy past of being able to paint brilliantly, drug addiction and alcoholism that could have taken him thirty years earlier than it did. There was a measure of cynicism and self-loathing that made his writing immune from hubris. Then he grew to like himself and his writing talked of categories of things he loved or things he didn't have time for.
Then he died.

AA Gill dying was shit.
It wasn't fair.
But so the chatter continues next door and the bass thumps it's way through the windows and walls of where I live. I'm going to open a bottle of Rioja and settle in for the second half of rugby. The people next door are enjoying the times of their young lives and it is tolerance and love and acceptance that AA Gill sought to impart in his last columns.
There's something in that.
Gill's writing is like biting into a huge, juicy peach on a warm day. It is succulent and moreish. It is a reward for the senses that shows you just how well spun English can be.
9 out of 10.

Dedicated, with fondness, to Richard Alex Wolicki who died a year ago today.

[Alex Butler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breathtaking first collection of essays on the refugee crisis. Gill has this ability to paint peoples' stories in a photorealistic lense without losing his poetic rhythm. These are some of the hardest hitting essays I have read on the European Refugee crisis. I would buy this just to read those essays.

However, I am struggling to go beyond three stars. Gill's other writing is so perfect in magazines and newspapers columns. Short, sharp and witty and something to chew on for ten minutes. Publishing these in the form of collected essays loses something for me. I started to see patterns in vocabulary and structure in the second half of the collection. I would recommend keeping this as a 'side book' to sip on from time to time, rather than down it in one.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I aways enjoyed reading A A Gill when he wrote for The Sunday Times so this collection of some of his articles was a fine reminder of just what a quality journalist he was. It's a bit of a mixed bag though and the collection doesn't really flow with a theme to lead you on through the pieces selected here. Some selections are quite short and others drag on a bit, but they're always interesting and worth reading, with Gill never willing to pull punches when he feels strongly about a subject. I left it wishing that he'd been a "proper" travel writer a la Paul Theroux and devoted books instead of articles to countries that he'd visited, but perhaps his strength was being short and sweet (or more often short and sour.) Such a shame that he's written his last.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that came to me precisely when I needed to read it. I picked this book up on a trip to Paris (ironically one of Gill's least favorite, least romanticized travel destinations) and sobbed the entire plane ride home. The magnitude of horror with which Gill describes the refugee camps he visits is like nothing I've ever read. We need more journalism like this. The essays were all beautifully written and devilishly witty. I will be reading more from Gill!

[Caroline Deacon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always enjoyed AA Gill’s columns and to read a collection of them all at once is quite a great. The opening section which covers refugees the world over is incredibly moving and a harrowing read. The final columns, where he is writing about the sudden and virulent onset of cancer is equally moving in a totally different way.
The middle is an eclectic mix of his other writings - long, short, all sorts of topics.
It’s a great read.

[Джордан · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this and like all things written by A.A Gill, once I started I couldn't bare to put the book down. He writes so beautifully, so randomly and so devoid of purpose. He does all of this with an ingenuity that makes it difficult to argue with public perceptions of him being the greatest essayist of his generation. He will be dearly missed and I highly recommend this book to anybody whose interested in him or good writing in general.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always enjoyed AA Gill's writings. He's witty, but not superficial and had some urgent things to say before his sad demise. That said there were chapters I skipped as they held less interest for me than others. A true human being, I'd love to have to met him - though would probably have been tonguetied and awestruck.

[Parvathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of essays - travel, political commentary, refugee journeys, British peculiarities, his own cancer diagnosis. All infused with wit, empathy, wisdom. The refugee journeys - of the Syrians, the Congolese, the Tunisians, the Rohingyas, the El Salvadorians - are the most affecting. A wonderful introduction to a much-loved columnist.

[Spraying Bricks · Rating 5 out of 5]

First time reading A.A.Gill...thoroughly entertained. Being a Jon Ronson fan I can’t help but feel that Gill was Ronson’s inspiration. However, Gill is clearly more articulate and well-travelled. There is a certain ironic cynicism to his style that is also very poetic.

[kangeiko · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sobbed through most of these articles. Beautiful writing, almost painfully poignant at times.

[Sarah Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it! Such brilliant thoughtful writing. I was sorry to get to the end.

[Paula Kougeas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written accounts of refugees in Europe.

[Caro Harper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel bad giving AA Gill only two stars. But this collection didnt grip me and has sat unfinished on my kindle for months.

[Logan WJ Jory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional

[Calum Petrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

AA Gill was a very good writer. Not in the Hitchens or Amis league but nonetheless capable of wonderful sentences and the ability to take almost any subject and make it worth reading about. But this collection, sadly, is tarnished by his essay on Brexit, where his snobbery and contempt for the lower orders, usually well enough repressed, explodes to the surface in a volcano of nastiness and superiority. You really need to have the wit of a Hitchens or an Amis to carry off a diatribe like that.

[Emma Dargue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, though provoking collection of essays and journalism that will have you bent double with laughter as well as tearing up in the more tragic moments. A.A. Gill blends pathos and humour effortlessly talking about essential issues in today's world, pulling at our heart strings talking about topics such as refugees and abuse of all kinds.