No one does the dressing-up stuff quite like the BBC. Period. With Andrew Davies's adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, which starts on BBC First on Sunday evening, they have raised the bar once again. Having seen the first episode, albeit on a poky tablet, I'm hooked already.Critics have raved. The Daily Telegraph's Ben Lawrence said of War and Peace that it was "safe to say that this is the greatest TV costume drama of the past decade" and a production that has "demystified" the novel: "its brilliance shared in a way that was truncated but never at the expense of psychological insight or emotional richness".Even Clive James, who's been reading and rereading Tolstoy's masterpiece for half his life, was impressed. Writing in The Guardian, he described it as a "lavish, sexy, heart-rending, head-spinning and generally not-half-bad adaptation" of the book.For the uninitiated, the novel - all 1200 or so pages of it - charts Napoleon's 1805 invasion of Russia, and its impact on Tsarist society through the stories of five aristocratic families. Distilling the sheer scope of the work into six television episodes was an epic undertaking (By comparison, the BBC's 1972 production, which starred a young Anthony Hopkins, dragged on for 15 hours over 20 episodes).Given the sprawl of characters, the cast of principals is large and includes such familiar notables as Tom Burke, Greta Scacchi, Stephen Rea, Gillian Anderson, Jim Broadbent, Brian Cox and Tuppence Middleton.But the story here chiefly concerns three young protagonists: the illegitimate, awkward and idealistic Pierre (Paul Dano), who has inherited a fortune; Natasha (Lily James), a young countess searching for love; and Andrei (James Norton), a philosophical military officer somewhat frustrated with society. As Napoleon's army advances on Russia, their privileged world is plunged into considerable turmoil and their lives change forever. The story concludes in 1812 with Napoleon's expulsion from Russia.Until then we have sumptuous cinematography and a convincing vision of early 19th-century Russia, gorgeous costumes, brilliant performances and pitched battles that put Game of Thrones to shame. And, this being a modern retelling, there is sex, too.Every scene with Natasha, Clive James has noted, is a key scene. "People who accuse Davies of being too interested in sex, however, should remember that Tolstoy himself was capable of conceiving a whole epic in the form of a beauty contest," he wrote, adding that Tolstoy understood that in the 1860s, the "marriage market" was a "meat market". Personality may count most, but initially, according to Tolstoy, "sexual attraction rules".'War & Peace' starts this Sunday on BBC First at 8pm..