The Go-Between (1971 film) envisaged Alec Guinness and Margaret Leighton in the leads and employed Nancy Mitford to write a script. L.P. Hartley later claimed Korda had no real intention to make a film of the book - he kept the rights hoping to re-sell them at a profit. Hartley says "I was so annoyed when I heard of this that I put a curse on him and he died, almost the next morning." Joseph Losey was interested in filming the novel. He tried to get financing for a version in 1963 after "The Servant" and says Pinter wrote "two thirds of a script".
The Go-Between simple, almost gentle story of a boy lost in a strange world of emotions." There have been regular editions from Penguin Books and other sources since 1958. By 1954 translations were being prepared in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, French and Italian. Others followed later in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian and German. The novel has also been set as an exam text with a study guide dedicated to it and there have been interdisciplinary studies on psychological and philosophical themes there. Later literary interpretations looked beyond the book’s immediately noticeable themes. For Colm Tóibín in his introduction to a 2002