Quad wrangles: Ian Richardson, left, and David Jason in the 1987 television adaptation of *Porterhouse Blue.*

The Decline and Fall of the Campus Novel

Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and Tom Sharpe used universities as their preferred vehicle for satire. But are modern colleges too ridiculous to parody?

By Lindsay Johns

Can it really be half a century since the publication of Porterhouse Blue? Tom Sharpe’s classic, scabrous satire on Oxbridge life was a novel so trenchant that it moulded – and arguably redefined – how the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, those twin bastions of erudition and academic excellence, were perceived by generations of undergraduates, and many more besides.

Having studied at Cambridge, Sharpe knew the types he was lampooning – fusty, vainglorious and bitter academics – “obtuse men, small men for whom Porterhouse was the world, and Cambridge the universe”. When he died, aged 85 in 2013, obituaries called Sharpe “the master of campus comedy fiction”. When Porterhouse Blue was published in 1974, it became part of a genre already a staple of British post-war literary culture: the campus novel.