Leslie Poles Hartley CBE (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972), known as
L. P. Hartley, was a British novelist and
short story writer. His best-known novels are the
Eustace and Hilda trilogy (1947) and
The Go-Between (1953). The latter was made into a
1971 film, directed by
Joseph Losey with a star cast, in an adaptation by
Harold Pinter. Its opening sentence, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there", has become almost
proverbial.