Monumental Lies : Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past

How the past is memorialized can have a dangerous influence on the future.Monumental Lies exposes the truths buried at contested heritage sites and demands that we safeguard the material evidence of history from both malign defenders and over-enthusiastic erasure.Robert Bevan challenges us to rethink our relationship with our contested spaces, from colonial statues and the physical legacy of fascism, to fake post-conflict reconstructions and ethno-nationalist narratives about beauty and tradition.He questions symbolic power and symbolic changes and explains why wording on a plaque is never a substitute for tackling problem monuments through artistic transformations at scale. A Financial Times Best Book of 2022