Past is a foreign country…

The complete quotation is “The past is foreign country: they do things differently over there.” These are the opening lines of L.P.Hartley’s novel The Go-between (1953), which have almost become a proverb. Harold Pinter wrote an adaptation of the novel, which David Losey made into a 1971 film of the same name, starring Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Edward Fox and Sir Michael Redgrave.