Trivia

He served in the Royal Marines during the 1940s.

He moved to South Africa in 1951, and became a social worker, teacher, and photographer. He wrote anti-apartheid plays for which he was deported to Britain in 1961.

He had three daughters with his wife, Nancy.

He had a heart attack live on Spanish television in the 1980s, and in later years would offer to show visitors the tape recorded.

One of Britain's most acclaimed satirist writers.

As a social worker in South Africa, his job entailed collecting black tuberculosis patients from hospitals and bringing them home to the townships to die. "It wasn't necessary for them to die. It was because only white people were being given the drugs".

He cited the works of British humorists Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse as an influence on his work.

His interest in satire began in his school years, when he was given Evelyn Waugh's novel "Divide and Fall" by a friendly teacher.

He was pleased to hear that P.G. Wodehouse, who inspired him, was a fan of his works.

He stayed in South Africa for ten years (1951-61), where he worked as a teacher, social worker and photographer. He wrote many plays in South Africa, and one of them, which criticized the apartheid policy in place at that time, got him in serious trouble: he was hounded by the secret police, spent the Christmas of 1960 in jail, and was deported back to Britain in 1961.

When he started producing bestsellers he moved to a large house in Dorset, a former school building, and became a keen gardener. He said he liked digging best out of the gardening.

His father, the Unitarian minister Reverend George Coverdale Sharpe, was a fascist, a follower of Oswald Mosley and a great believer in Adolf Hitler. Sharpe initially shared his father's beliefs (as a child he wore a German army belt), but upon seeing newsreels of the Nazi concentration camps was horrified at Nazism and renounced it.

The inspiration for his first novel "Riotous Assembly", which was a satire of the South African police in the apartheid era, came from an old-fashioned English colonial aunt of a friend of his, who lived near a police station and complained that the screams of tortured prisoners disturbed her afternoon naps.

Much in demand for interviews and often besieged by fans, he developed two public personas. One was a blustering ex-colonial type, the other a genial old buffer. Sharpe said he admired old military men, but thought of himself as the buffer.

He taught at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, but was able to give up his lecturer job because his publisher, Secker and Warburg (now Harvill Secker), agreed to pay him £3,000 a year for three years to be a full-time writer.