Parade’s End Book 4 Review: The Last Post

The Last Post is Ford Madox Ford’s Titus Alone: the final book that most readers forget about and that most editors don’t want them to read anyway. It’s very different from its predecessors, and it’s also ‘disappointing’ (please note inverted commas) in that it risks spoiling everything the reader has been through with Christopher and…

Parade’s End Book 3 Review: A Man Could Stand Up –

A Man Could Stand Up – resembles a slight but moving intermezzo leading up to a grand conclusion. Ford Madox Ford thankfully relieves us of spending more time with the exhausting Sylvia Tietjens in constructing a book in three parts in which Christopher and Valentine gradually move so much closer together, intellectually and spiritually, that…

Parade’s End Book 2 Review: No More Parades

When last we saw poor Christopher Tietjens in the final pages of Some Do Not…, his whole life was in ruins: he had already been sent home from the War once because of shellshock and concussion, he did not, after all, manage to go to bed with Valentine the night before returning to France, causing…

Parade’s End Book 1 Review: Some Do Not…

The best thing about pretty much anything set in the World War I period, be it books, movies or TV programs, is what you might call ‘the set’, or ‘the world’ the characters inhabit. Breakfast rooms and drawing rooms and dining rooms with shiny wooden paneling, fashionable wallpaper, chandeliers and gilt mirrors, Chippendale armchairs, fresh…