Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism

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’. 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 with Jeremy Clarkson on a canal boat in France. 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 returns to his roots in Scotland, and sees New York through new eyes. He meets the stateless – the Muslim Rohingyas exiled from Burma, and the homeless in a moving and humane account of a shelter in King’s Cross. But more than any other subject, a recurring theme emerges in the overwhelming story of our times: the refugee crisis. In the last few years A. A. Gill has written with compassion and anger about the refugees’ story, giving us both its human face and its appalling context. He has travelled to Lampedusa to meet the Africans desperately trying to reach Europe, visited Syrian refugees in the Lebanon, met the migrants on the vast and dangerous journey from Kos through the Balkans, and witnessed the Jungle refugee camp in Calais. The resulting articles are journalism at its finest and fiercest.