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A.A. Gill

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Critic

The Resume

    (June 28, 1954-December 10, 2016)
    Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
    Birth name was Adrian Anthony Gill
    Restaurant critic for the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair
    Television critic for the Sunday Times
    Wrote the novels ‘Sap Rising’ (1996) and ‘Starcrossed’ (1999)

Why he might be annoying:

    After college, he spent six years as an artist: ‘I was just good enough to keep myself doing it, but not good enough to be top-rate.’
    At age 30, he was drinking a bottle of scotch a day and doctors warned him he would dead within a year if he continued.
    He fathered twins out of wedlock.
    Because of dyslexia, his handwriting was indecipherable to anyone but himself, so he had to dictate his reviews.
    The Sunday Times revealed that he had been the subject of 62 Press Complaints Commission investigations in a five-year period (2006-10).
    He was cited in the National Assembly of Wales as a prime example of ‘persistent anti-Welsh racism in the UK media’ after he called the Welsh ‘dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.’ (1998)
    He shot a baboon to ‘get a sense if what it might be like to kill someone.’ (2009)
    He was ejected from one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, with Ramsay saying ‘Personal attacks and insulting my staff is something I’m not putting up with.’
    He won the Literary Review’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ award (1999).

Why he might not be annoying:

    He decided to go by his initials when writing in gratitude to Alcoholics Anonymous for their role in his recovery.
    He said Gordon Ramsay was ‘a wonderful chef, but a really second-rate human being.’
    He described vegetarians as ‘people who get pleasure from not eating things.’
    He noted that he got to ‘watch television, eat good food and travel and then write about it. As lives go, that’s pretty good.’
    Fellow restaurant critic William Sitwell wrote, ‘He had a way with words, phrases and sentences that elevated his prose from mere language…. There was sheer delight, music even, in the way he wrote.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 10 Votes: 90.0% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 8 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 102 Votes: 74.51% Annoying