• About Kathy Shaidle
  • Kathy Shaidle: Donate
  • Kathy Shaidle: Privacy policy

5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

Mark Steyn: ‘No one will write AA Gill’s obituary as well as he would have’

December 15, 2016 By Kathy Shaidle

Mark Steyn writes:

As I said, all that’s from just one A A Gill column, written at a far higher level than a dying industry demands, at least to judge from The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was published just two years ago, when he confidently expected to live to see another four World Cups, as he put it. Thus he neglected to note that another sign of the accumulating years is that more and more of your contemporaries, whether former pop stars or mighty captains of industry, migrate from “Today’s Birthdays” to the obituary column. And so a few weeks ago he mentioned to his readers in the course of a restaurant review that he had “an embarrassment of cancer, the full English” – for non-Britons, that’s an allusion to the huge and indigestible “full English breakfast” (which, credit where it’s due, is a vegan snack next to the full Irish).

So he coined a phrase even for his death sentence, and one that’s almost too perfect for a gourmand and restaurant critic. And its rueful if faintly parodic stiff-upper-lipped stoicism would have earned the gruff approval of all those long-gone Englishmen of the Fifties opening up pub doors and asking if the major had been in. Rest in peace.

More from my site

  • My NEW Taki’s column: The English Way of CancerMy NEW Taki’s column: The English Way of Cancer
  • ‘I don’t like A.A. Gill and I don’t imagine many people do’‘I don’t like A.A. Gill and I don’t imagine many people do’
  • Mark Steyn on Leonard Cohen
  • ‘ William Raspberry Obituaries Fail to Note Famous Change of Mind About Rush Limbaugh’‘ William Raspberry Obituaries Fail to Note Famous Change of Mind About Rush Limbaugh’

Filed Under: Kathy Shaidle

« Gavin McInnes: Political correctness is ‘a tangled web of bullshit concocted by vindictive cunts who hate the world’
‘The language of equality/political correctness has taken on a secondary function of being a class indicator’ »
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter


Ebates.ca

RSS my husband’s blog

  • LAWTON: Liberal bill removes “advocating terrorism offences” from Criminal Code
  • Smollett threat letter called “enormous mistake”; Purported attack location identified; Federal charges “certain”
  • Reporter Andy Ngo: The List Of Fake Hate Crimes Is Pretty Long (Update)
  • Continental Breakfast
  • Was Kamala Harris part of the Jussie Smollett hoax?
  • Women in Afghanistan fear a return to oppression as they are left out of peace talks with Taliban
  • Muslim Congresswoman’s District Reported to Be ‘Terrorist Recruitment Capital’ of US
  • Did the Media Jump the Gun on the Jussie Smollett Story?
  • Ocasio-Cortez says Trump’s border barrier is ‘like the Berlin Wall’
  • Cities And States Are Scaling Back Their ‘Green’ Ambitions As Costs Skyrocket

Archives

Copyright © 2019 · Magazine Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in