Gill's broadsides, his impatience, his scathing penportraits were, it becomes particularly clear when you read his work en bloc, the byproduct of his desire that we should wriggle free of conformity, embrace pleasure, eat our fill -- Alex Clark GUARDIAN Lines in the Sand, a treat for his many fans, gathers the best of Gill's journalism from 2011 to 2016. Ranging from travel reportage to serio-comic appreciations of Savile Row tweed and the delights of condensed milk, the pieces are lit up by the author's trademark literary flourishes and waspish put-downs -- Ian Thomson EVENING STANDARD Serene, painfully wise ... glimpses of a loftier truth are the glory of Gill's essays, and they open metaphysical vistas in journalistic junkets or stunts contrived for the sake of a feature article ... His essays - so delicate in their connoisseurship of nature and culture, so tender in their sketches of family, friends and anonymous strangers in refugee camps, so brightly witty and yet so unexpectedly profound - affirm the manifold pleasures of being alive, which is why they enrich the life of anyone who reads them, and in Gill's absence will go on doing so -- Peter Conrad OBSERVER As Lines in the Sand, his final collection of journalism - published just a few weeks after his death from cancer, aged 62 - makes clear, Mr Gill's opinions actually held prejudice, piety and pretension to account ... Mr Gill's overriding message throughout these pieces is that experience should be gulped down, pleasure embraced, and conformity shunned ... "There's a basic human need to tell someone what we saw, where we've been," Mr Gill writes, and his dispatches - opinionated, experienced - are told with eloquence and elan, from war zones and home counties camp sites, to, finally, the cancer ward ... Elsewhere, he writes of Lord Snowdon: "His immensely sympathetic eye was often a surprise to people who knew only his waspish tongue." There could be no better epitaph for Mr Gill himself. -- Stuart Husband MR PORTER AA Gill was that rare writer, famously able to serve up waspishness and compassion in the same sentence. Both are on full display in Lines in the Sand ... Written with style and ubiquitous wit, this collection of essays is only further proof that Gill's voice will be sorely missed -- Laura Garmeson FINANCIAL TIMES

A. A. Gill was born in Edinburgh. He is the author of A. A. Gill is Away, The Angry Island, Previous Convictions, Table Talk, Paper View, A. A. Gill is Further Away and The Golden Door, as well as two novels and the memoir Pour Me. He is the TV and restaurant critic and regular features-writer for the Sunday Times, columnist for Esquire, and contributor to Australian Gourmet Traveller. He lives in London and spends much of his year travelling. He has been nominated for more awards than he has won (the 2016 PEN Ackerley Prize a case in point).