Mark the calendar: I have been to Cambridge, having taken up a kind invitation from Piers Brendon, one of our reviewers, to have lunch with him at Churchill College. Apart from his company and conversation I wanted to hear more about the book he is writing about his friend Tom Sharpe, the great novelist and anti-apartheid satirist whose writing was the backdrop to my teenage years. I grew up with Wilt, and Blott, and Porterhouse Blue; if I’m honest, Sharpe probably influenced me more than Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse – although perhaps not quite as much as Graham Greene.