There’s one thing to add to the tidal wave of tributes last week after AA Gill died. They saluted a journalist, a constant scribbler, an acidulous wordsmith who specialised in counterintuitive destruction. Yet, it turned out, even his victims seemed to love him: for his turn of phrase and twist of mind.
“Journalism is success, writing books is achievement,” he once told the Observer (after his two novels had crashed and burned in the same critical fire he stoked week by week). Wrong again. Adrian Gill was a success because his presence, his personality, his pen, arrived Sunday after Sunday. Who cares about a couple of entries in the Amazon back catalogue? He did what he did; and, in the great English tradition of skewering pretension, his quotes will live on.
• The Trump effect may have buoyed US print newspaper sales but barely rippled them on this side of the Atlantic as the most momentous election of the 21st century came and went last month. Every national morning daily from the Star to the Telegraph fell back on October’s ABC results. Populism doesn’t help the pop press. Only at the top end – the Times and the Guardian – was there a move forwards not back. And just one paper grew print sales year-on-year without need for free bulk copies to polish its performance. Let’s here it again for the Observer.
A riveting read for would-be writers
This Christmas’ best last-minute gift for a journalist (or journalism student) who wants to expand the horizons of their trade? Sarah Lonsdale’s The Journalist in British Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, £17.99 in paperback). Put George Orwell, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene together and you’ve got a cynical but frail reporter on the edge of society, a tradesman hanging onto a shrivelling existence. But spread the net much wider – as Lonsdale does – and individual heroes of revelation and change emerge.
This is a moving image of moral certitude and shabby depravity. It’s a fascinating bit of academic research that makes you stop and examine your own preconceptions – as well as a great tour through over a century of bookshelves and movie-studio cutting rooms.
