Previous Convictions: assignments from here and there A A Gill Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £16.99 ISBN 0297851624

Revered and reviled in equal measure, A A Gill has forged an enviable career opining on food, TV, travel and just about anything else. Previous Convictions is the latest collection of his musings: 22 travel pieces and a number of essays on subjects ranging from golf, shooting and beetles to Edward Hopper, his father, his son and even his dog.

The cover of this book is a close-up of Gill's face, swathed in what appears to be a Bedouin scarf, his demeanour suitably wise, rugged, pensive - somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia. He knows this is ridiculous. "Nobody judges a book by its cover as mercilessly or as rigorously as the author," he says in the foreword. Writers regard their books as if they were "the guts of some auspicious soothsaying chicken". Which is why, as you may have noticed, it's a "big picture of me".

Never a stranger to controversy, Gill has fallen foul of the racial equality and press complaints commissions for lambasting the Welsh - "dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls" - and he once called the English a "lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed beefy-bummed herd". True to form, Previous Convictions is replete with incendiary generalisations. His (athletic) prose is littered with scathing epithets: Glastonbury is "Hippie Crufts"; Salvador in Brazil is "God's Brent Cross"; golf is "cannibalism"; and Baghdad's Green Zone is "Desperate Housewives with guns". He is a sartorial fascist. The third-world poor, he informs us, have the "style sense of a gay municipal gardener".

Yet there is plenty he is serious about. In Peshawar, a poverty-stricken town on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, he notes how locals' charitable response to Afghan refugees "beggars our own mean-minded, mealy-mouthed immigration policies".

Indeed, Gill's mood swings rather unpredictably between acerbic contempt and sentimentality. "Africans aren't some other benighted, desensitised 'them' from the darkness. They're us. They're family," he writes. And while he professes not to be a "spectrally sensitive bloke" ("I don't do 'otherworldly'"), his dead grandfather comes to him "as plain as the scent on his face" when he's hunting in Scotland.

The travel pieces are perhaps the strongest, because he explores things outside his usual frame of reference. Admittedly, he sometimes chooses soft targets: the petrol museum in George W Bush's Texas hometown; Las Vegas - a place where "irony just curls up and dies"; and the joyless landscape of Manhattan gyms. He goes on holiday with Jeremy Clarkson to the gay mecca of Mykonos, with predictable results. But he also tells some powerful stories - of the casual, "bad horror-movie" violence he witnesses in Haiti, and the unnerving, "surreal banality" of Baghdad's Green Zone, with its neatly clipped hedges.

Unfortunately, there is no original material here: it has all been "capriciously retrieved" from newspapers and magazines (mostly the Sunday Times and GQ). Which begs the question - why do we need a big white book with his face on the cover? Why not just visit Times Online?

Because, whether you think he's a witty, erudite social critic or a contemptible, misogynist xenophobe - or both - there is a market for him. His shameless name-dropping can get tedious. He is (in his own words) a "megalomaniac little madam". But he is also a sharp, talented wordsmith, and as much as he might rile, he will also have you snorting with laughter.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website