Tom Sharpe: A Personal Memoir

Tom Sharpe was one of the funniest writers of his time and this book tells the story of his life. Subtitled A Personal Memoir, it stems from the author’s fifty-year friendship with Tom. It is therefore based on vivid memories and a long correspondence, enriched by masses of further original material. What this evidence reveals is a man of mercury. Not only was Tom a master of rout, he was, as Piers Brendon says, “obsessive, generous, affectionate, humane, charming, brutal, pugnacious, outrageous, vain, egotistical, crude, puerile, self-deprecating, vulnerable, formidable, sentimental, manic, depressive and (the word is inescapable) charismatic”. Tom’s career was as kaleidoscopic as his character. An unwanted baby, he had a disturbed childhood. His father was both a Unitarian minister and a convinced Nazi and during the 1930s he took Tom, wearing a Swastika armband, to Blackshirt rallies. After running away from one school, Tom went to Lancing where he felt a compulsion to shout obscenities in the chapel. A year after his father’s death in 1944, the adolescent Tom saw newsreel film of Belsen which left a permanent scar on his psyche.