REVIEW BY NICK HEWITT
Historian and broadcaster Tessa Dunlop has energetically breathed life into the ‘history in a hundred’ format with her enthralling new book, which should be essential reading not just for those with an interest in war and commemoration, but for anyone wanting a fresh perspective on British identity (or identities) in these divisive times. Her book is no mere catalogue – it is a concise but thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be British.
War monuments surround us. Sometimes they represent a community’s only significant piece of public art, and are often cherished and well-maintained, but they are nonetheless not always seen or read; we pass them by, and they vanish in plain sight. In Lest We Forget, Dunlop shows how these monuments can also be portals to a vast vault filled with human stories of endurance, determination, and valour, or pain, division, and suffering.
Dunlop’s great strengths are empathy and a warm and accessible narrative style; we even meet her mother, on a filthy day at the Commando Memorial in the Highlands. In a very personal journey around the UK, she introduces not only inanimate works of metal and stone, but also an extraordinary cast of characters, whose lives are interwoven with the memorials she describes. Creating a memorial is almost always a symbolic act, representative of the values of its time. What they stand for can change as years pass and Dunlop, recognising this, fearlessly weaves in contemporary political and moral debate throughout. Readers may not always agree with her, but she deftly avoids preaching and most will appreciate the opportunity to reflect on different points of view.
