English writer Leslie Poles (L. P.) Hartley was BOTD in 1895. Born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire to a middle-class family, he studied at Harrow School and Oxford University, where he befriended gay writer Clifford Kitchin. At the outbreak of World War One, he suspended his studies to join the British Army. Poor health prevented him from active service, and he received a medical discharge in 1918. Returning to Oxford, his friends included writers Aldous Huxley and Lord David Cecil, who appears to have been the unrequited love of his life. Hartley became a book critic, and befriended many members of the Bloomsbury Group, having a falling-out with Virginia Woolf after his lukewarm review of her novel The Waves. At Kitchin’s suggestion, Hartley visited Venice, beginning a lifelong love affair with the city where he holidayed annually. A lifelong bachelor, Hartley’s fear of his sexuality was reflected in his work, in which love and sexuality are destructive forces. His 1924 novella Simonetta Jenkins, a melodrama about woman’s fated romance with a swarthy Venetian gondolier, caused a mild scandal for its portrait of sexual obsession. His fiction found little success until his 1940s trilogy The Shrimp and the Anemone, loosely based on his relationship with his sister Enid. He is best known for his 1953 novel The Go-Between, a melodrama set in pre-war Edwardian England about a young boy unknowingly caught in a love triangle between an aristocrat’s daughter and a working-class gamekeeper. Hartley’s portrait of class warfare and transgressive sexuality struck a chord with the disaffected post-World War Two generation, and become an international bestseller. The book was adapted into a film in 1971, directed by Joseph Losey from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Premiering at the Cannes Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or, the film was a critical and box office success, reviving interest in Hartley’s work. Many of his later novels hinted at homosexual attraction between men, but was only made explicit in The Harness Room, published at the end of his life. He died in 1972, aged 76.