Best known for his food and travel writing, he was also a television critic, was restaurant reviewer of The Sunday Times, wrote for Vanity Fair, GQ, and Esquire, and published numerous books.
[15] He wrote several books on individual restaurants and their cuisine – Ivy (1997), Le Caprice (1999), Breakfast at the Wolseley (2008) and Brasserie Zedel (2016).
In 1997, in The Sunday Times, Gill described the Welsh as "loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls".
His comments were reported to the Commission for Racial Equality[22] and used as an example of what was described as "persistent anti-Welsh racism in the UK media" in a motion in the National Assembly for Wales.
"[23] Gill's comments led him to become the subject of the song "Little Trolls" by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, the B-side to their 2001 single "Ocean Spray".
In the song, Manics' lyricist Nicky Wire reflects Gill's comments on the Welsh back at him, referring to him as a "Spiteful twisted unforgiven, sad and inverted and stunted, retarded ugly balding old man".
[25] Gill made further comments regarding the Isle of Man in his Sunday Times column on 23 May 2010,[26] when he described its citizens as falling into two types: "hopeless, inbred mouth-breathers known as Bennies" and "retired, small arms dealers and accountants who deal in rainforest futures".
[30] Humberside Police and Crime Commissioner Matthew Grove described Gill as "A tweed-suited, Mayfair-based writer, whose only experience of the North of England was his visit to Cleethorpes and his regular trips salmon fishing in Scotland".
[31] Gill reported in his Sunday Times column in October 2009 that he shot a baboon dead, prompting outrage from animal rights groups.
[34][35][36] Gill's Sunday Times editor, John Witherow, responded to Balding's complaint: "In my view some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.
[37] In his defence, The Sunday Times pointed out that in the five years prior to Balding's, the PCC had received 62 complaints involving Gill but none had been upheld.
[38] Reviewing Mary Beard's BBC television series Meet the Romans in April 2012, Gill wrote that the academic "should be kept away from cameras altogether".
[39] Beard in response accused him of being "frightened of smart women" and suggested "maybe it's precisely because he did not go to university that he never quite learned the rigour of intellectual argument and he thinks that he can pass off insults as wit.
[9][5] On 1 April 1984, after consuming two bottles of vintage champagne with his father on the train to Wiltshire, he checked himself into the Clouds House addiction treatment centre in East Knoyle.
[11] On 20 November 2016, Gill wrote in his Sunday Times column of his engagement to Formby, and also disclosed that he was suffering from "the full English" of cancer.
[11][47] In his final article in the Sunday Times Magazine, published on 11 December 2016, he disclosed that he had a primary lung tumour with metastases to his neck and pancreas, and detailed the medical treatment that he was receiving, with a commentary on his experiences as a terminal cancer patient in the National Health Service.