Tom Sharpe (1928-2013) was an English satirical novelist, master of the escalating farce and one of the funniest writers Britain produced in the twentieth century.
Born in London, the son of a Unitarian minister with fascist sympathies, a childhood he later described with characteristic bleak comedy, he was educated at Lancing and Cambridge, did National Service in the Royal Marines, and spent a decade in South Africa working as a social worker, teacher and photographer until the apartheid regime deported him in 1961 for sedition, having taken exception to a play he wrote.
His revenge was literary: Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, savage farces about the South African police, launched his career. Wilt, published in 1976 and drawing on his years teaching liberal studies to day-release apprentices at a Cambridge technical college, introduced Henry Wilt, a downtrodden lecturer whose idle fantasies of murdering his overbearing wife Eva collide with an inflatable doll, a building site and the immovable Inspector Flint, in a plot that tightens with the logic of a nightmare and the timing of a music hall act.
Four Wilt sequels followed, alongside Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape, both memorably televised. He spent his later years in Catalonia, still detonating the pretensions of institutions with glee.
