Discussed in this essay:

Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession, by Marjorie Garber. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 464 pages. $32.

Throughout the United Kingdom, local authorities have eyes on their public statuary, nervous for the safety of racist city fathers and colonial movers such as Oliver Cromwell, Cecil Rhodes, and Winston Churchill (whose imperialist dodges are hardly recognized as such by many English people). Not long ago in Bristol, a late-Victorian bronze of the seventeenth-century slave trader and Tory parliamentarian Edward Colston was torn from its plinth by protesters and thrown into Bristol Harbour. Even the founder of…