Tom Sharpe

The British novelist Tom Sharpe has died, aged 85. I remember sitting on a plane somewhere waiting to take off, my nose buried in one of Sharpe's books, perhaps Blott on the Landscape. I came to a passage that made me laugh, and then continued reading and laughed harder, and then went back to the start of the passage and laughed so hard that tears were popping from my eyes. I hurt my side. Literally. Since this was pre-9/11, I wasn't carried off the plane for interrogation. Tom Sharpe was, as the obituaries said, like a cross between Wodehouse and Waugh, multiplied by LSD. I think I came across his books poking around a used bookshop in London about 25 years ago. The sad occasion of his death provides a happy excuse for re-reading his work.