His paternal grandfather Johann Hermann Hüffer was first to publish Westphalian poet and author Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.

He was named after his maternal grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he would eventually write.

[3] In November 1892, at 18, he became a Catholic, "very much at the encouragement of some Hueffer relatives, but partly (he confessed) galled by the 'militant atheism and anarchism' of his English cousins.

[5] Ford's neighbours in Winchelsea included the authors Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, W. H. Hudson, Henry James in nearby Rye, and H. G.

[9] In the summer of 1927, The New York Times reported that Ford had converted a mill building in Avignon, France into a home and workshop that he called "Le Vieux Moulin".

Set just before World War I, The Good Soldier chronicles the tragic expatriate lives of two "perfect couples", one British and one American, using intricate flashbacks.

Ford pronounced himself a "Tory mad about historic continuity" and believed the novelist's function was to serve as the historian of his own time.

He worked for the War Propaganda Bureau, managed by C. F. G. Masterman, along with Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Murray.

After writing the two propaganda books, Ford enlisted at 41 years of age into the Welsh Regiment of the British Army on 30 July 1915.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ford took the side of the left Republican faction, declaring: "I am unhesitatingly for the existing Spanish Government and against Franco's attempt—on every ground of feeling and reason ... Mr Franco wishes to establish a government resting on the arms of Moors, Germans, Italians.

Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets in London in the teens particularly valued Ford's poetry as exemplifying treatment of modern subjects in contemporary diction.

George Seldes, in his book Witness to a Century, describes Ford ("probably in 1932") recalling his writing collaboration with Joseph Conrad, and the lack of acknowledgment by publishers of his status as co-author.

"[20] Hemingway devoted a chapter of his Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast to an encounter with Ford at a café in Paris during the early 1920s.

"[21] During a later sojourn in the United States, Ford was involved with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell (who was then a student).

[26] The Parade's End tetralogy was made into an acclaimed BBC/HBO 5 part TV series in 2012, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and scripted by Tom Stoppard.