Tom Sharpe Popular Books
Tom Sharpe Biography & Facts
Thomas Ridley Sharpe (30 March 1928 – 6 June 2013) was an English satirical novelist, best known for his Wilt series, as well as Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, all three of which were adapted for television. Life Sharpe was born in Holloway, London, and brought up in Croydon. Sharpe's father, the Reverend George Coverdale Sharpe, was a Unitarian minister who was active in far-right politics in the 1930s. He was chairman of the Acton and Ealing branch of The Link, and a member of the Nordic League. He declared that he hated Jews "in the sense that he hated all corruption". Sharpe initially shared some of his father's views, but was horrified on seeing films of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. University of Cambridge Sharpe was educated at Bloxham School, on which he based Groxbourne in Vintage Stuff, followed by Lancing College. He then did national service in the Royal Marines before being admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history and social anthropology. South Africa Sharpe moved to South Africa in 1951, where he worked as a social worker and a teacher. He was friendly with the activist and artist Harold Strachan until they fell out over a woman. Sharpe's time in South Africa inspired his novels Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, in which he mocked the apartheid regime. He also wrote a play, The South African, which was critical of the regime. After it was performed in London, Sharpe was arrested for sedition in 1961 and deported from South Africa. Teaching and later life After returning to England, Sharpe took a position as a history lecturer at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, later Anglia Ruskin University. This experience inspired his Wilt series. From 1995 onward he and his American wife, Nancy, divided their time between Cambridge and their home in Llafranc, Spain, where he wrote Wilt in Nowhere. The couple had three daughters. Despite living in Catalonia, he did not learn either Spanish or Catalan. "I don't want to learn the language," he said, "I don't want to hear what the price of meat is." Death Sharpe died on 6 June 2013 in Llafranc from complications of diabetes at the age of 85. He was reported to have been working on an autobiography. It was also said that he had suffered a stroke a few weeks earlier. Paying tribute, the author Robert McCrum wrote "The Tom Sharpe I knew was generous, acerbic, engaging, and full of wicked fun." Susan Sandon, Sharpe's editor at Random House, remarked that he was "witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life". His ashes were interred in the graveyard at the remote church in Thockrington, Northumberland, where his father had been a preacher. Adaptations Blott on the Landscape was adapted by BBC TV in 1985 and broadcast in six episodes of 50 minutes each. It was scripted by Malcolm Bradbury and starred George Cole as Sir Giles Lynchwood, Geraldine James as Lady Maud and David Suchet as Blott. In 1987 Porterhouse Blue was adapted for television, again by Bradbury, in four episodes for Channel 4. It starred David Jason as Skullion and Ian Richardson as Sir Godber Evans. In 1989 Wilt was made into a film by LWT, featuring Griff Rhys Jones as Henry Wilt, Mel Smith as Inspector Flint and Alison Steadman as Eva Wilt. Critical response Michael Dirda said in an interview: "Tom Sharpe is very funny – but exceptionally vulgar, crude and offensive. Many view him as Britain's funniest living novelist. Most people feel that his first two novels, set in a fictionalized South Africa, are his best: Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure." Leonard R. N. Ashley wrote in the Encyclopedia of British Humorists that "Sharpe's humorous techniques naturally derive from his fundamental approach, which is that of the furious farceur who compounds anger and amusement." and "His dialogue is deft and more restrained than his characterization, which sometimes is mere caricature ..." Ashley also quotes reviews and comments by many critics, and cites 21 published reviews or critical comments on Sharpe's work, with brief summaries or quotations from each. Influence Martin Levin, in a review of Porterhouse Blue, wrote that "Sharpe is one of England's funniest writers. He's in the tradition of the 19th-century satirist Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote novels of ideas laced with physical, slapstick farce." Adrian Mourby wrote that "Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and Vintage Stuff are books that hark back to a golden age of academic dottiness, of the kind that has all but disappeared since the 1940s when Sharpe himself was a student." Caroline Moorehead writes (in a review of Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents): "When I was a fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye – such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based." Legacy The Los Angeles Times wrote of The Great Pursuit: "No one, from author to critic, goes unscathed in this satire on the publishing business on both sides of the Atlantic. Agent Frensic comes across a deliciously filthy, but anonymous, manuscript that promises bestsellerdom. Frensic supplies a fake author and they are off down the primrose path. Much of this book is funny and devastatingly accurate until the plot disperses ..." More critically, Tom Payne wrote of Wilt in Nowhere: "Even half an hour after reading Tom Sharpe's 14th novel, it's difficult to remember what happened in it. ... Wilt is a victim of our times, and Sharpe doesn't seem to like them much. ... Sharpe might be happier in another age – the 18th century, perhaps – but even then he'd find plenty to rail against. It's tempting to see him as a contemporary Smollett: his plots are guided by whatever vices he feels like including, or whatever images are in his head. ... Wilt in Nowhere isn't Sharpe's finest work. His best tales put the reader firmly in a world: we can cherish the memories of the atavistic dons in Porterhouse Blue, or rail at the South African police in Indecent Exposure (1973). The present novel is simply a hapless tour of bits of England and Florida, in which colourful things happen and puzzle the police." Sharpe sent up the class-conscious English writer Dornford Yates in Indecent Exposure. He worked on an adaptation of Yates' thriller She Fell Among Thieves for the BBC in 1977, which contained similar elements of parody. Bibliography Piemburg, South Africa series Riotous Assembly (1971) ISBN 9780871131430 Indecent Exposure (1973) ISBN 9780871131423 Porterhouse Blue series Porterhouse Blue (1974) ISBN 9780871132796 Grantchester Grind (1995) ISBN 9780099466543 Wilt series Wilt (197.... Discover the Tom Sharpe popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Tom Sharpe books.
Best Seller Tom Sharpe Books of 2024
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Porterhouse Blue
Tom SharpeThe 'endlessly funny' novel widely regarded as a classic of comic English literaturePorterhouse College is world renowned for its gastronomic excellence, the arrogance of its Fello...
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Indecent Exposure
Tom SharpeIn Piemburgem, the deceptively peacefullooking capital of Zululand, Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Verkramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even true...
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After Me, The Deluge
David ForrestThis is the story of a young priest in the tiny French village of St. PierredesMonts who receives a telephone call from God warning that he is about to destroy mankind with a secon...
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Letters from an Unknown Woman
Gerard WoodwardWith her children evacuated and her husband at the front, Tory Pace is grudgingly sharing the family home with her irascible mother; working at the local gelatin factoryto help the...
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Chart Throb
Ben EltonChart Throb.The ultimate pop quest. Ninety five thousand hopefuls. Three judges. Just one winner. And that's Calvin Simms, the genius behind the show. Calvin always wins because Ca...
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Kensington Heights
Leslie ThomasFrank Inigo Savage simply wants to be alone and the top flat of Kensington Heights seems just the place. Until the other bizarre and eccentric inhabitants of the building start arr...
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Goodbye Soldier
Spike MilliganSpike Milligan's legendary war memoirs are a hilarious and subversive firsthand account of the Second World War, as well as a fascinating portrait of the formative years of this to...
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Onward Virgin Soldiers
Leslie ThomasBursting with life and bawdy humour, National Serviceman Brigg is now a Regular Army sergeant defending the Empire in the beds and bars of Hong Kong.Peacetime diversions include se...
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The Bible According to Spike Milligan
Spike MilliganSpike Milligan's legendary war memoirs are a hilarious and subversive firsthand account of the Second World War, as well as a fascinating portrait of the formative years of this to...
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Peace Work
Spike MilliganSpike Milligan's legendary war memoirs are a hilarious and subversive firsthand account of the Second World War, as well as a fascinating portrait of the formative years of this to...
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Ancestral Vices
Tom SharpeWith his only friend a computer, Walden Yapp has lived a singular life. Professor of Demotic History at the University of Kloone, Yapp spends his days highlighting the corrupt capi...
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Stand Up Virgin Soldiers
Leslie ThomasThe worst has happened. On the eve of their return to Blighty, Brigg and his fellow National Servicemen find themselves sentenced to another six months in Panglin Barracks...Many o...
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Leyendas de Tamora
S.B. FranciscoUna novela picaresca para el siglo XXI Es costumbre prudente que sea un tercero quien le escriba a uno la presentación de su no...
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Grantchester Grind
Tom SharpeThough as cunning as ever, the formidable Skullion previously head porter, now elevated to Master is showing signs of physical frailty after his stroke. So the tricky business of...
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Mort - Playtext
Stephen Briggs & Terry PratchettDeath comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job.But when Mort is left in charge for an evening, he allows his heart to rule his head and soon the whole of causali...
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The Wilt Alternative
Tom SharpeHenry Wilt is no longer the victim of his own uncontrolled fantasies. As Head of a reconstituted Liberal Studies Department he has assumed power without authority at the Fenland Co...
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Fragmentos de inexistencia
Miquel Martín i Serra & Montserrat VerdaguerLa biografía del maestro del humor británico más desaforado y desmadrado.Tom Sharpe dijo en una ocasión: «Mi biografía es tan extravagante que probablemente explica la clase de lib...
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The Dearest And The Best
Leslie ThomasIn the spring of 1940, the spectre of war turned into grim reality. And on the English home front, men, women and children found themselves swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncer...
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The Fall Girl
Denise SewellThe day Frances Fall steals a baby from outside a shop, is the day her past catches up with her. At the age of thirtysix, Frances is forced to relive a life dominated on one side b...
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Monty
Spike MilliganVOLUME THREE OF SPIKE MILLIGAN'S LEGENDARY MEMOIRS IS A HILARIOUS, SUBVERSIVE FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF WW2'The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read' Sund...