Bevan backs himself with unimpeachable voices, such as Angela Davis (“regardless of what people think about it, it’s not really going to bring about change”), and Zyahna Bryant, who started the petition to bring down Confederate statues at Charlottesville (“We are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckoning with the institutional racism that takes place inside”). He makes short work of those who claim that statues aren’t history at all, so their removal doesn’t represent any kind of falsification.

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What does Bevan propose instead? A range of possible, situation-appropriate responses, all stronger than the feeble, tokenistic “retain and explain” policies of Tory heritage. Statues can be turned to face the wall, they can be taken off their plinths – cut down to size, in fact. They can be augmented, or a monument can be made of their destruction: in Asuncion, Paraguay, an artist has created a new artwork consisting of the head of the tyrant Stroessner crushed between two massive concrete blocks.

Bevan pays particular attention to the town of Bolzano in northern Italy, where the facade of the town’s financial courts is propaganda in stone: a frieze celebrating Mussolini and the fascist slogan “Believe Obey Fight”. Rather than demolish it, the council have attached to it an LED display bearing Hannah Arendt’s words “There is no right to obey”. Not just the present “in dialogue” with the past, but directly rebuking it, it turns a monument to fascism into a statement of resistance.

Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past by Robert Bevan is published by Verso, $39.99.