AA Gill: waspish restaurant critic and destroyer of schlock TV, a figure who never comes across as a sensitive soul in his columns for the Sunday Times and GQ. His new collection of travel reportage, AA Gill is Away, frequently warns against travelling with preconceptions, though, and so it is no surprise to peel off that veneer and find a different sort of writer in this book. Gill"s assignments have taken him around the world in pursuit of the great stand-first: a visit to the worst place in the world (the Aral Sea), how to write a porno film in a weekend and the joys of owning a Rolls Royce. In accordance with what is clearly a whistle-stop lifestyle, his book takes us all over the world: to Sudan, Bethlehem, Los Angeles, Patagonia--and Wilmslow in Cheshire. His writing is usually acute and provocative, and the various African articles are particularly sharp as he rails against the creeping colonialism perpetuated by aid agencies and international finance, and the crass priorities of drug companies whose profits are in Prozac and not cures for malaria or sleeping sickness. Inevitably with a ragbag collection of this sort, the quality of the pieces vary. At times, you feel that Gill has dragged out his copy for his editors, and at others there is a surfeit of metaphors in which Gill tries too hard to be funny. But his trademark fury polishes his prose, which usually retains its sharpness and succeeds in conveying the thrill of immediacy without which no travel writing can sparkle. --Toby Green