In 1925, while he was teaching at a boy's school in Wales, the young Evelyn Waugh attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. After getting fairly far from shore, he was forced to turn back: a shoal of stinging jellyfish had beset him. Macabre, comic, and ironic, this incident epitomizes Waugh's entire

Agitated, Angry, Clever, Realist fiction, Religious, Sardonic

Craig Raine has an extraterrestrial sensibility. His 1979 volume, "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home," established a new school of poetry -- for those who experience this world as if it were Mars. Writing from the unfamiliar perspective of a space alien living in modern England, Raine forces his reader

Clever, Dense, Distorted, Illusive, Postmodern poetry, Quirky

Style is an unspoken language of identity. But what do things like clothes and hairdos mean? How should we interpret a mohawk as opposed to a beehive, pedalpushers versus intentionally ripped jeans, ska music versus hardcore? Dick Hebdige thinks he has the answer. Hebdige's slim 1979 monograph "Su

Clever, Cultural studies/new historicism, Eclectic, Pioneering, Political, Urban

It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being a proper history student at Cambridge to living life as a de

Bloomsbury, Clever, Excessive, Glamour, Perverse, Profane