Tom Sharpe

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.

Quotes[edit]

By shooting your cook you were refusing him permission to enter your house.
- Riotous Assembly (1971)

If a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal.
- Porterhouse Blue (1974)

I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials. ... There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with cream.
- Porterhouse Blue (1974)
- See Charles Kingsley, and cf. There's more than one way to skin a cat
- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (1982), p. 243

The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "The Mill on the Floss" to Motor Mechanics.
- Wilt (1976)

While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact.
- Wilt (1976)

"Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools.
- Wilt (1976)

Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money.
- Wilt (1976)

The number of choirboys indecently assaulted annually by vicars and churchwardens may lead you to suppose that England is a deeply religious country.
- The Wilt Alternative (1979)

There's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.
- The Wilt Alternative (1979)

'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'
- Wilt on High (1984)

Fifty miles away, Lord Lynchknowle’s dinner had been interrupted by the arrival of a police car and the news of his daughter’s death. The fact that it had come between the mackerel pâté and the game pie, and on the wine side, an excellent Montrachet and a Château Lafite 1962, several bottles of which he’d opened to impress the Home Secretary and two old friends from the Foreign Office, particularly annoyed him. Not that he intended to let the news spoil his meal by announcing it before he’d finished, but he could foresee an ugly episode with his wife afterwards for no better reason than that he had come back to the table with the rather unfortunate remark that it was nothing important. Of course, he could always excuse himself on the grounds that hospitality came first, and old Freddie was the Home Secretary after all, and he wasn’t going to let that Lafite ’62 go to waste, but somehow he knew Hilary was going to kick up the devil of a fuss about it afterwards.
- Wilt on High (1984)

The authorities had gone on to inculcate their own classless ideals into students whose presence at the University was in itself a measure of their determination to climb the social ladder by the only means made available in the Welfare State.
- Ancestral Vices (1980)

Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked.
- Grantchester Grind (1995)

"Sharpe attacks Blair, Bush", Expatica (6 October 2004)

I am in favour of foxhunting because foxes kill chickens
- On the campaign to outlaw fox hunting

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.
- Martin Levin (reviewing Porterhouse Blue), "Paperback Guide", The Victoria Advocate (14 May 1989), p. 10

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.
- Adrian Mourby, "Death of the Dons Quixote", Times Higher Education (London: TSL Education Ltd., 21 February 1997)

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.
- Caroline Moorehead (reviewing Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and its Discontents), "Campaigning on the campus", The Spectator (10 September 2005)

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.
- Tom Payne (reviewing Wilt in Nowhere), "Music to scare bears by", The Telegraph (22 August 2004)

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Tom Sharpe