But the zingers made his name. An invitation to the book party for his first novel, “Sap Rising” (1996), described him as “the bastard son of P. G. Wodehouse and the Marquis de Sade,” and he made good on the advertisement. The Welsh, he once wrote in a column on Welsh restaurants, were “stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.”

In 2014, he won the Hatchet Job of the Year award from the website Omnivore for his appraisal of “Autobiography,” by the singer Morrissey, whom he called “the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath.” He added, “And those are just his good qualities.”

Image Mr. Gill’s 2012 book, published in Britain as “The Golden Door: Letters to America.” Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Howls of protest were music to his ears.

“When people fatuously ask me why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing,” he wrote in his memoir. “Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.”

Adrian Anthony Gill was born on June 28, 1954, in Edinburgh, where his father, Michael, was an editor at The Scotsman. After being hired by BBC Radio as a culture reporter, he moved the family to London when Adrian was 2 and went on to become a producer of television documentaries, notably “Civilisation,” with Kenneth Clark, and “Alistair Cooke’s America.”

Adrian’s mother, the former Yvonne Gilan, was an actress and vocal coach who made a memorable appearance in the British television sitcom “Fawlty Towers” as the nymphomaniac Mrs. Peignoir.

After leaving St. Christopher’s, a Quaker boarding school in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, without graduating, Mr. Gill studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London but failed to advance. He worked for a time in a bookshop in Soho before continuing his art education at the Slade School, which he left in his final year.