Every Monument Will Fall: A Story Of Remembering And Forgetting

‘An extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource’ — Paul Gilroy

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.

We are delighted to welcome Professor Dan Hicks back to Housmans to discuss his incredible new book Every Monument Will Fall: A Story Of Remembering And Forgetting, a beautifully written, polemical but generous work. 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 Pitt Rivers Museum, where 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.

OUR SPEAKERS:

Dan Hicks MA (Oxon), PhD, FSA, MCIfA (born 1972) is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan works on the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital worlds, and on the history of Archaeology, Anthropology Art, and Architecture. His curatorial work has ranged widely, and has included the co-curated exhibition and book Lande: the Calais “Jungle” and Beyond in 2019 and Victor Ehikhamenor at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2022. You can read a 2025 interview about his background, career and writing on the Society of Antiquaties of London website here.

Dan’s latest book is Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting, published with Penguin (Hutchinson Heinemann), and he also recorded the audio book for Every Monument Will Fall.

Dan has published nine authored and edited books, and has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, for a wide range of audiences: from the Times Literary Supplement to The Art Newspaper, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, Architectural Review, Frieze Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent. Dan has regularly appeared on live Radio and TV news and in documentaries, including BBC News at Ten, Channel 4 News, Sky News, LBC, Times Radio, and BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, The Moral Maze, The World Tonight, Front Row, The Today Programme and Making History.

Dr Mai Musié’s research focuses on race and ethnicity in the ancient world. She is also interested in medieval manuscripts, particularly from Ethiopian-Eritrean traditions. She is passionate about exploring the interconnectivity between the ancient Mediterranean world and North-East Africa.

​Mai arrived in the UK aged 8 as a child refugee of the Ethiopian-Eritrean civil war. As a young child she spent many happy days in South Lambeth Tate Library exploring stories written about the ancient world, particularly Greek myths. Mai went on to study Classical Civilisation at university and forged a career in engaging the public with the ancient and medieval world.

Onyekachi Wambu is a respected writer and journalist. He was born in Nigeria in 1960 and arrived in Britain after the Biafran War. In the late 1980s he edited the Voice newspaper, and has directed documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS. He is the Executive Director of the African Foundation for Development. His most recent book, Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience, was published in 2023. Onyekachi is also currently working with the All Party-Parliamentary Group on Afrikan-Reparations which in March 2025 published the Laying Ancestors to Rest Policy Brief.

Advanced booking strongly recommended.

Doors open at 6:45, event starts 7:00.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’, your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.