‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ is the opening line of The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley’s brilliant novel about self-sacrifice, self-denial and devotion to duty in the buttoned-up backwaters of Edwardian England. An England, that is, which was still recovering from a war whose outcome had been in large part determined by the self-sacrifice, self-denial and devotion to duty of its ordinary citizens.