Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

More from The Common Reader

• We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.
• A light here required a shadow there.
• A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
• For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.
• If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
• Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.