Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

by Dan Hicks

Brought to you by Penguin.

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Published May 1, 2025

About the author

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford

Reviews

[Shriya · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the beginning of this month, I found myself in a pair of rather painful Oxfords, walking down the streets of London to Swedenborg Hall, to attend a talk by one of most talked of professors at Oxford, who had written a book on–among other things–Oxford and the legacy of colonialism that still permeates through that ancient and enchanted town. Not too long ago–rather barely four days before–I myself had been at Oxford–pointing at the statue of Rhodes at Oriel college as we walked down the High Street, heading to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, walking down Little Clarendon street for lunch at my favourite French restaurant. In other words, tracing the footsteps of the story that’s been told and remains unfinished in this 413 paged book that greeted me the minute I returned home. Since then, for the better part of May, this book has been tucked under my arm, lying flat against my bosom, even served as a makeshift pillow or a travel companion. So, when I finished it three days ago—my heart cleaved as it does when letting go of a dear friend. What would I now do with my evenings?
Perhaps, I’d take the story further. Perhaps you could continue to decolonise the narrative, I almost heard @profdanhicks say in his voice.
Be fair warned: it’s a book that speaks the truth and truth is seldom easy to digest, often bitter. However, it’s the truth we all need to hear: the successors of former colonies and of former colonialists. It doesn’t try to convert you. It doesn’t try to rally you around a “fad movement of neo-liberalism”. It just speaks the truth. Simply, beautifully, almost like Italo Calvino’s lyrical style. It will make you laugh. It will make you bristle with anger. And if you’re anything like me, it will make you argue with Dan in the margins and annotate and hope and pray he really means it when he said in the end: “Come to Oxford next week, next year or next decade. I’ll buy you a coffee…” not because you want to have coffee with him but because you want to experience the world through his decolonising eyes, hear him talk passionately, experience the town you love and hate in the same breath through his perspective, argue and discuss things with him as you walk.
Read this book because you deserve to hear the truth. Read it because all of us—enslavers and the enslaved, masters and the owned, or just their descendants perhaps–all of us need to decolonise our minds, the way we study the past, art, history, archaeology. Stories have been written by the victors for too long. It’s time that the wheel of the narrative turned again.

Read it because it reads like a conversation, because it’s the least archaeological book about archaeology. Read it because like me you love literary references thrown in even when talking about heritage, because you tend to throw in a reference or two to Hamlet or Emily Dickinson. Read it because reading is perhaps the only way to keep yourself sane in the AI world. Read to relearn. Read to ponder.

[Hattie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ 150 pages

i just hated how this was written. the second person, the excessive references to oxford, the esoteric writing style. i'm really interested in the topic but couldn't push through. audiobook was also a hard listen!

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is on such an important topic, but the experimental writing style is off putting. The main points could have been made more clearly and directly in less than 100 pages instead the book is over 400 pages

[Liam McMahon · Rating 3 out of 5]

okay fine abolish museums but maybe keep the dinosaurs and interactive sections?? [please]

[Berklee Baum · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book seems to have something important to say - that colonial museums and monuments continue to reinforce racist stereotypes and support systems of oppression. However, the book is so confusing and wildly convoluted that it never really gets to making this point. The use of the ‘you’ perspective, as if you as the reader are in conversation with the author, allows Hicks to mansplain his opinions as he writes his thoughts in a stream of consciousness manner that is extremely hard to follow. He constantly refers to ‘what this book will do’ without actually doing it. I am unsure who the intended audience is - if you want to engage the general public, this massive book employing perplexing academic language is not the way to do it. If you want to reach academics, they are also not going to be inclined to read a book that seems to have no clear organisation or deep analysis of facts and events. The style and length of the book is truly self-indulgent.

Additionally, he writes about the importance of repatriation from a position of power, as a curator at the Pitt Rivers, and yet despite having over 400 pages to say about this, Hicks has yet to help repatriate any cultural items in the two decades he has worked for the museum he claims to believe should not exist.

[Chris ELLIOTT · Rating 5 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed reading this book despite the fairly grim nature of the topic. The writing style is very different from other books on society and racism that I have read but, having over the surprise and in tune with it, it made the book an engaging and enjoyable read.

Reading this book was an unusual experience as the well laid out charges against the Victorian racists and their continuing legacy are not softened by the unusual and engaging style of the writing.

[gaverne Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read! So thought provoking and made me rethink many things. Great book.