Tom Sharpe, who wrote numerous ‘laugh-aloud’ novels utlising farce, satire and a touch of vulgarity, died in Spain this week aged 85.
He was educated at Bloxham School before moving to Lancing College and then, via national service in the marines, to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read history.
His father was reportedly a Nazi sympathiser during the 1930s about which Sharpe commented “I think he must have gone dotty!” Sharpe moved to South Africa aged 23 where he worked as a social worker and teacher but was deported after a play he wrote about the apartheid regime was performed in London.

An early success was his book Porterhouse Blue which draws upon the incongruity of tradition and progress at an Oxbridge College.
A year later he followed up with by Blott on the Landscape: a story about proposals to build a motorway routed through a country estate. Both books were adapted for television in the 1980s.
He is probably best known for the Wilt series of five novels about the misfortunes of an accident-prone lecturer.

People will doubtless continue to laugh aloud at his writing for many years to come.