Every Monument Will Fall

Some historians write about the past as if they were erecting a monument, trying to breathe everlasting life into heroes. Such books often blend the subject with the author's self-image, ratchetting and embedding old prejudices, as if each hagiographic turn of phrase is the turn of another steel screw sunk flush to fix a commemorative plaque that bears the name. Part Frankenstein, part Pygmalion, but rendered as words not things, such vicarious monuments to the author's position and privilege, to their vision of civilisation anchored in the past, anchored in the bones of the dead, are executed not as if carving letters onto a tombstone or reading a eulogy, but as if slaughtering villagers in Afghanistan, starving millions in Benghal, fire-storming Dresden. They are written by tapping at the keyboard as if not just silencing the past, but speaking over the voices of the past. Voices the author wants the reader neither to hear nor to remember, blanked out in the lingering supersize shadow of the high-explosive narrative.Every Monument Will Fall does the very opposite. It revitalises the genre of biography by producing the written equivalent of pulling down a statue - digging through the life of the Victorian archaeologist General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, dismantling the whole idea that whiteness is culturally superior.