Leslie Poles Hartley (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972) was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best known work is The Go-Between (1953), which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. The book's opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost proverbial.
Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. He...
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Leslie Poles Hartley (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972) was a British writer, known for novels and short stories. His best known work is The Go-Between (1953), which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by Harold Pinter. The book's opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost proverbial.
Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. He was educated in Cliftonville, Thanet, then briefly at Clifton College, where he first met Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin, and at Harrow School.
In 1915 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read modern history. There he befriended Aldous Huxley. In 1916 he joined the British Army. He was commissioned as an officer but for health reasons never left the United Kingdom. Invalided out, he returned to Oxford in 1919, where he gathered a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil.
His work was published in Oxford Poetry in 1920 and...
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