Lewis Jones

Bookends: About a boy

issue 12 November 2011

The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel, the Norfolk house and estate are fairly incidental but, as Christopher Hartop’s charming and generously illustrated Norfolk Summer: Making The Go-Between (John Adamson, £12.99) reminds us, they dominate the film.

As a local historian and cinéaste, Hartop recreates the cloudy summer of 1970 — made to seem sunny mainly by sound-effects, of buzzing insects and so on — at Melton Constable Hall, where Losey, Julie Christie, Alan Bates...

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