A.A. Gill of Vanity Fair packages his bite
'Previous Convictions,' a collection of his columns, figures to expand his reputation as an attack dog.
NEW YORK — A.A. GILL is a man in perpetual motion. Whether he's flying around the world reporting on atrocities or settling in for tea in a hotel lobby, his hands gesticulate wildly and his facial expressions change by the moment. To spend time with Gill is not unlike reading his ever-increasing body of work -- it is to be caught up in a hyper-reality of enthusiasm and outrage.
In England, Gill is as famous for his journalism as many of the celebrities whose photos regularly fill the newspaper he writes for. Every week he files two columns for the London Sunday Times' style section, one on television and one on restaurants, along with an endless series of travel stories. For the last three years he has also become known in America as an attack-dog columnist for Vanity Fair magazine. That reputation is set to expand here this month with the release of a collection of his journalism, "Previous Convictions," 32 essays that redefine "vituperative."
Recently, Gill was sitting in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel in New York, having just returned from Washington, D.C. His partner, journalist Nicola Formby, and an assistant were waiting for him upstairs while a sedan idled in the rainy street to take him to his flight back to London. He looked at a copy of the bound edition of "Previous Convictions" and began to intone, unprompted, as he poured tea for two.
"It's a collection. They're always awkward, collections. The nature of what we do is that it all happens very fast -- you get that instant gratification. But the other side of course is that it's in the bottom of the poodle's tray the next day, and I'm not sure that anyone who thought they were writing for anything longer than the poodle's tray should be in our business. That's in the nature of how we write. And I think that people who think that they are writing for posterity generally write very bad journalism. So you never really know if anything is going to have a life that makes it worth going into hardcover."
Going here and there
The book is divided into two sections -- the first half is called "Here," all set in the U.K., where Gill sets his sights on the theater, on golf and on hunting, among other pursuits. The second half, "There," is a series of dizzyingly entertaining and chilling dispatches from around the world, including pieces filed from Haiti, Iraq and New York.
