Facing up to cancer

Last Saturday, the world was told that eminent restaurant guide writer AA Gill had died.

The UK Sunday Times dedicated to his memory no fewer than four columns plus photograph on the front page, plus four pages in the front part of the paper, one with a sort of editorial included, plus wide coverage in the magazine, with a photograph on the front cover – the result of an extensive interview just days before his death.

To put everything in context, just days before, the death was announced of Philip Knightley, an investigative journalist on the Sunday Times staff at the time of editor Sir Harold Evans – the golden age of Fleet Street journalism – but you wouldn’t find a mention of him in the Sunday Times.

AA Gill was a renowned writer of witty restaurant guides that made his columns priceless for his many fans, now mourning the sheer loss.

He confronted his cancer with characteristic verve and wit, announcing his illness with typical elan in a review last month of a fish-and-chip shop in Whitby, North Yorkshire. “I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English,” he wrote.

In the interview carried by the magazine, he described his admiration for the NHS, even after he learned that the revolutionary new drug his doctors were recommending was only available privately.

He was the heart and soul of the Sunday Times newsroom. He embodied, according to the paper, the spirit and aspiration of the paper’s readers: cheeky, passionate, funny, fearless, engaged, possessed of a lively conscience and a swaggering style. “Whether writing about television, restaurants or royals, he brought colour and originality and wit; when he wrote about refugees and the forgotten people of the earth, an intense and unyielding compassion.”

He was a great reporter. He could empathise with anybody and anything. Even a herd of cows was not beyond or beneath him – “a collective of wide-hipped, large-breasted females, nurturing and fecund, non-judgemental”. This was the kind of writing that makes you pause and look again at something so familiar that you had ceased to notice it.

But his brilliance was never remote or intimidating. If he affected a dandyish style, it was always to draw the readers in, not to keep them out. Even when reviewing the fictionalized royal family in the TV series The Crown, he quite clearly intended to put the real one in its place – “a not very bright, frightened and stifled family, looking out at a world they don’t understand and don’t really like.”

His prose was a conspiracy with his readers. He loved them and they loved him back, not least because, like them, he landed himself in the odd fight. Berkshire folk were angered when he reviewed the Fat Duck restaurant and ended up critical of the county.

Gill believed in God and was an observant Anglican. This reinforced his care for the forgotten of the world – for the Rohingya people of Burma, the migrants in Mexico or on Lampedusa or the trapped and despised in the Calais “jungle” where he heartbreakingly ob-