The passing of a sharp tongue: the glorious hatchet of AA Gill

Not all of Gill's writings featured the critic's savage, burying putdown. His writings could also verge on the worshipful – his love note, or notes, to the United States in The Golden Door is replete with respectful sharpness and occasional unevenness. (The tasty generalisation does not always leave you sated. Stock standard evidence is sometimes called for.) As with all love affairs, the intoxicating substance addles.

None of this detracts from the delight the chapters provide. On US attitudes to sex, his observations tickle and taunt. "With American guys the seduction stuff is corny, the romance is the script from Friends, but the bed post isn't the finishing post, it's the whistle. It's the pitch. I am their Superbowl."

If Gill harmed others with his steel-tipped words, he certainly had a good go at harming himself in his pickled salad days: a diet heavy with Benylin and vodka prior to turning 30 almost killed him. But the caustic critic was obviously too keen to live, seeing his survival as a miracle.

This miracle came to an end soon after the publication of his last piece, a confessing note about cancer and the woes of failed treatment. True to form, he emphasised the effects of this rapid conquest of his body by this most savage of adversaries.

His criticism needed at times the finer tuning of reserve, the bookish refrain of modesty. But every field of potent criticism requires its hatchet. Hypocrisy sometimes takes root in the field, and starts influencing both reader and writer into complacence. Subjects of debate become soft; consensus is reached and the errors of ways ignored.

This was a mistake Gill never made, and while he sometimes missed the mark with a brawling comment or a growling missive, he was often on point, and stylishly so. His journalism was tonic and bristle. To read Gill was to take a dose of the savage revelation to heart.