Downton for adults

For five weeks from 24 August BBC2 is doing a brave thing: serialising Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s quartet of first world war novels. Arguably the first great modernist English novel and, according to Graham Greene, the greatest novel in English to come out of that war, this £12-million project is a brave thing to do for three reasons: it is the world of Downton but not Downton. It is not what we expect of war novels. And it was written by Ford Madox Ford.

Ford Madox who? is the response that anyone writing about Ford has come to expect. He’s often confused with the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, his maternal grandfather, or even with Henry (no relation). Some have heard of his best-known novel, The Good Soldier; those that have read it tend never to forget it.

Ford, who died in 1939 and who wrote Parade’s End in the 1920s after wartime service as an over-age subaltern, has never been popular.