• Largely, literature is about ways of being human, and so embraces questions such as these:

Why do people do the things they do? How do other people think and feel? What is important? How should we live? What happens when we do not live the way we should? What is love? How should we think of ourselves? How should we think of death? What is the past and what does it mean? What will the future bring? What is out there?

An interest in such matters may never be more vivid in us than when we are young. And literature in another language may provide as many avenues to consideration of such existential matters as may literature in one's mother tongue.

• A considerable amount of any language will remain incomprehensible to people who lack knowledge of its cultural bases. This is most obviously true of the registers of language that one needs to forge a way through university and flourish (or at least cope) in the haunts of the well-educated.

Literature is a major element of culture. Furthermore, it is a window on all the other elements: on religion, on beliefs generally, on shared views on the past, on folklore, on language itself.

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