Porterhouse Blue

Cambridge, tradition, privilege, gluttony, sex, snobbery, and the delicate academic art of doing absolutely nothing useful with great authority.

Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe is a glorious farce set in a fictional Cambridge college where ancient customs are not so much preserved as fossilised. Porterhouse is a place of port, prejudice, peculiar rituals, and men who regard reform as an act of vandalism.

Then change arrives, as it rudely tends to do, and the college’s ancient absurdities begin to wobble. Sharpe attacks the whole thing with savage comic energy: dons, servants, students, administrators, and the grand machinery of institutional nonsense all get their turn in the stocks.

There is a lovely irony in the title. “Porterhouse Blue” sounds distinguished, perhaps even noble. In practice, it is a shade somewhere between academic decay and indigestion.

This fair copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books, is ideal for readers of comic fiction, campus satire, British farce, and anyone who enjoys watching tradition defend itself with increasing panic and decreasing dignity.

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