‘The English humorists!’ V S Pritchett once wrote. ‘Through a fog compounded of tobacco smoke, the stink of spirits and the breath of bailiffs, we see their melancholy faces.’ If the jury is still out on the question of whether Tom Sharpe (1928–2013) was a humorist or a satirist – or maybe an oddly rancorous hybrid of the two – then it’s a racing certainty that readers who make their way to the end of Piers Brendon’s entertaining memoir will conclude, à la Pritchett, that, whatever the nature of his achievements, he was a profoundly unhappy man.

Where did this unhappiness come from? Doubtless, some of the demons who coursed through Sharpe’s consciousness and made their presence felt in his sixteen novels can be tracked back to his father, a Unitarian minister and zealous Nazi who thought Sir Oswald Mosley insufficiently anti-Semitic and marked his son’s thirteenth birthday with the gift of a copy of Mein Kampf. There was also a terrible Home Counties boarding school, from which the teenage Tom eventually absconded – his mother, he remembered, fainted at the sight of his returning figure, while the Revd Sharpe offered ‘a strangely sympathetic reception’.

Sharpe père died in 1944, shortly before he could be apprised of the realities of Belsen. Even with the benefit of Brendon’s sympathetic hindsight, his son’s early career can look faintly desultory: national service in the Royal Marines, three years at Pembroke College, Cambridge – this supplied the backdrop to