Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, author and jazz pianist. However he is best known - and beloved - as the restaurant critic of the Observer. His new book, Chewing the Fat, is a hilariously rollicking collection of his funniest columns, in which he also attempts to answer such pressing questions as ‘Does bacon improve everything?’ and ‘Is gin really the devil’s work?’.

Hailed by Nigella Lawson as ‘Rayner at his rambunctious best: upfront, full fat, and always deliciously written’, these are dispatches from decades spent at the very frontline of eating. Joining Jay in this celebration of gargantuan appetites, glorious wit and deliciousness in book form is Dr Annie Gray, author of the official companion book to The Kitchen Cabinet and one of Britain’s leading food historians.

Dr Annie Gray is one of Britain’s leading food historians. She works as a broadcaster, author and consultant. You may have heard her on BBC Radio 4’s The Kitchen Cabinet, or seen her cooking up Victorian pies or Tudor stuffed boars’ heads on the BBC. Her books include The Greedy Queen: eating with Victoria, Victory in the Kitchen: the life of Churchill’s Cook, and the forthcoming At Christmas We Feast: Festive Food through the Ages.

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