L. P. Hartley is a novelist with a piety for days gone by, the period and the ambience in which he grew up. He shows a particular mastery in describing the years of childhood and adolescence. His first major novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone, is the story of an over-protective, possessive elder sister and an excessively dependent and timid small boy: it is set in the early years of the century, but it did not appear until 1944 when the author was forty-nine. The Go-Between, which many critics regard as his finest achievement, was written nine years later and the plot takes place in the year 1900 when its hero was twelve. Mr Bloomfield discusses Hartley's achievement as a clear-sighted and sophisticated chronicler of upper-middle class life, neither moralist nor a rebel, but the transmitter of a civilized idiom. Paul Bloomfield is also the author of Disraeli in this series.