Aa Gill Best Quotes

There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can’t make worse.

Europe is, for the most part, a hugger-mugger continent that works best on the consensus of inertia and precedent. Those who have dogmatic and contrarian beliefs can cause disproportionate ructions and ripples in our overcrowded and hierarchical communities.

But they also confuse two distinct occupations: cooks and chefs. Cooks do it at home for love. Chefs do it in public for money. Dinner parties are karaoke cheffery. There

The best way to imagine how big the emptiness of nature is, is to jam it with humanity.

Of the 1,223 new medicines developed between 1975 and 1997, just 13 were for tropical diseases. Only four sprang from the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to cure humans. None were found on purpose.

Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn’t take them, or that you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them. Drug companies can find prophylactics for rich Western holiday-makers, but not for people who live with disease the other 50 weeks of the year.

The steam-borne smells of root and muscle, allium and brassica, saffron, thyme, turmeric, allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon, caramelised sugar, brandy and sour vinegar, duck thighs and salmon scales curl and emulsify into gobbets that dribble into nubbed stalactites on its galvanised yawn.

If you want to know what the Georgians were really like, just watch the furniture experts on the Roadshow, those spraunced and pinched plonkers with marbled hair and patinated jowls pulling ancient drawers off old widows’ ball-and-claw feet and getting all arch about their lovely dovetails. That’s the true voice of Georgiana.

Alexander Hamilton didn’t want a democracy at all, fearing mob rule, the dictatorship of the majority. Instead, he called for a president and a legislature elected for life—essentially the House of Lords. He demanded strong central government that could veto states. It was all very patrician and paternalistic. He even mentioned getting rid of the states altogether. George Washington loathed the idea of political parties, seeing factions as being the cause for strife that would stop men voting with their consciences or in the best interest of their state.

A food critic really only needs two things in order to do his job properly: no eating disorders and the gastric morals of a hooker with a mortgage

Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawnmowers, vampires and tanning salons, mittens and Braille. Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration.

Plenty of Westerners come, though, to pick through its jumble for something off the peg that fits; they do yoga as exercise, which is a bit like walking the stations of the cross as aerobics.

A lobster bisque ought to be the crowning glory of the potager. And this one was excellent. Silky as a gigolo’s compliment and fishy as a chancellor’s promise.

People threw their elderly relatives into the snow and granny flats became dining rooms, while they tied up miniature vegetables and sprayed raspberry vinegar like tomcats on the pull.

The cabbage seems to have been unknown to the Hebrews. It is not mentioned in the Bible.’ I love that – so French. Just the slightest note of disappointment with God; just the merest raised eyebrow and pursued Gallic lip.

He puts a pot, big enough to boil a small missionary, onto the wide burner and chucks in skeleton segments two-handed.

Every surface I touched was sticky; the cutlery, tables, trays and chairs clung to us like lonely drunks.

Peter Elers, one of the first openly gay vicars in the Church of England, who blessed a lesbian ‘marriage’ in 1976 on the understanding that, if the Church blessed battleships and budgerigars, it ought to find it in its heart to bless men and women in love.

I once saw ten minutes of The Big Breakfast and it was quite enough to convince me that television in the morning was like drinking in the morning: only real addicts could possibly do it without throwing up.

It is the most complete skin-crawling, silently screaming evocation of hell; the reinforced concrete transubstantiation of sleepless megalomania and hysterical fear.

recognisable human shapes. The models are from another planet. No photograph prepares you for the way they look in the absence of flesh. A photograph adds a stone to everybody’s image. These girls are fuse-wire thin and unbelievably tall. Their legs are like grissini, barely capable of taking the weight of their etiolated bodies. They move in an odd, careful, swaying way that is newborn and uncoordinated, like creatures who would be happier slithering

This is only a hotel because they charge you $40 to stay. There’s no furniture and no soap. The water comes in a prostated, rusty dribble. The bath has been used to interrogate sheep. The towel is a bar mat. There’s a blanket, a chipped tin teapot and a carpet that looks like tar applied with a comb.

The stipulation for a contestant on The X Factor is an uncontrollable vibrato and a great deal of cancer in the family. The show will drag its sugary slug trail of sentimentality from now until the traditional Christmas single of an overproduced 1980s ballad doused with a lachrymose orchestra. Not so much a wall of sound as a shroud of sound, dedicated to some carcinogenically defunct auntie. As Oscar Wilde so perceptively put it, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.