Every Monument Will Fall

2027Textbooks is the academic division of ReadMatter Bookshop. Building on our years of experience in the book industry, we have partnered with leading publishers to offer more than 30,000 academic and contemporary titles.

Every book is brand new and ordered on demand directly from the publisher once your order is placed. Due to the size of our catalogue, we do not keep these titles in stock.

Please allow up to 15 working days for dispatch. In the rare event that a title is temporarily out of stock at the publisher, the lead time may be longer. We will contact you if this affects your order.

• Publisher: Penguin Random House
• Published: 2025
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 592
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9781529152753
• Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.3 x 4 cm
• Weight: 0.6 kg
• Synopsis:

  There's a culture war, we're told. Or maybe it's a war on culture - a war with a deeper and more troubling history than you might think.
  
  Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.
  
  Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations and from the battlefields of Crimea and the American Civil War to British colonial outposts in southern Ireland. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.
  
  What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn't, who is remembered and who is forgotten; who has been treated as human and who has not.
  
  Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.