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“... subtlety, to subscribe. Unfortunately, the world that he made the butt of his wit disappeared, as Tom Sharpe reminds us in his short introduction to the Picador Saki,* at more or less the same time as Munro: fortunately, the stories are funny enough to survive in spite of that. But it would be wrong to forget that that world existed, that Saki’s ...”

“... days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the ...”

“... the tyro Wilson of Kindly Light. (It also echoes the current offering of his Secker stablemate, Tom Sharpe, who is into public schools as well.) Alongside Giles’s extreme plight, the school comedy is discordant. But presumably that is another desired effect in this uneasy novel. As used to be said of Thomas Hardy, Wilson turns his screw of misery ...”

“... South Africa policemen tried to be law-abiding officers of Justice.’ Comic writer though he is, Tom Sharpe is genuinely banned in South Africa. He was deported in 1961, ten years after which he began his belated (but since then very prolific) novel-writing career. His best work is conventionally taken to be the first two novels, written in England but ...”

“... who had therefore never taken a country walk in his life?’ Wrottesley Poly, however, is as much Tom Sharpe territory as a part of the Amis-Bradbury-Lodge world, and it is in the matter of comic plotting that Coming from Behind seemed to me to fail. Jacobson’s portrayal of Goldberg is flawless, but he seems to have little idea what to do with him, and ...”

“... Phelps puts it in his no-nonsense style, having discovered that Wodehouse once spoke well of a Tom Sharpe effort, ‘that The Master should commend such bawdy black humour is superficially surprising, given his dislike for anything raunchy, but he must have appreciated that he had met another comic master who could also make the language dance to his ...”

“... experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland Street then put me onto Tom Sharpe, and a large proportion of the ladies I meet in public, or scrutinise in the illustrated press, have begun to appear to me as inflatable dolls clothed in wisps of ivy. I have read four Sharpes, and since he is now well into his 12th volume there ...”

“... likely to find easy charm and an undercurrent of throwaway, slightly macho humour reminiscent of Tom Sharpe or Howard Jacobson. (A character called Smokes decides not to tell his girlfriend that he’s been unfaithful to her; after satisfying himself that he is morally justified in the deception, he reflects that ‘this scenario would have the added ...”

“... so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in ...”

“... dentist paid by the Opposition to bug the President’s teeth, seem to have been recruited from a Tom Sharpe novel. The President himself is vain enough, a nasty piece of work, posing on horseback, threatening his staff with knocking their false teeth out, but that’s all there is to him. The action moves to Britain for the penultimate section, which ...”

“... plot evidently attempts a dirtied-up Wodehouse style, of the kind successfully carried off by Tom Sharpe; the prose style of the opening chapter may be an expression of admiration for Waugh’s haughtiness, but it is overpunctuated and quickly degenerates (when the whores appear) into an overexcited parody of breathless pornography; of Isherwood ...”

“... or coriander and cinnamon vodka. The climax of the novel is a farcical scene in the matter of Tom Sharpe (and no less unfunny), when Konstantin, on a secret midnight mushroom hunt in a prohibited military area, is caught with his trousers down by Clea, Pan Tadeusz and most of the British Army. This is followed by the meat of the book: a long and ...”

“... and beaten up. Wilt is now doomed to be rescued by the CND feminist coven ... The cleverness of Sharpe’s plotting and the skill of the narrative must be admired – and beneath the frightening jokes there is a sort of passion, a justified indignation about bugging and drugging, half-witted feminism, unjust policemen and bomber ...”

“... Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of rising above them. But this is scarcely to say anything new: ‘too little, too late’ has been the general verdict here in America. Few ...”

“... and Gomorrah. In all this there is much that is reminiscent, for the modern reader, of the work of Tom s Sharpe. Other things apart, Rotten Borough is a witty and entertaining novel which, for all its lightning lunges into farce, is written with sufficient skill to make its improbable and outrageous story reasonably ...”