Geoff Archer's welcome book is the first survey of sculpted war memorials from the First World War. They formed ‘the most extensive project of sculpture the country has seen’: innumerable thousands of memorials were erected from the Armistice onwards to pay tribute to the absent dead. The architectural aspect of the genre – especially those by Sir Edwin Lutyens – has received increasing attention in recent years, but for the more figural kind there has so far been no detailed guide. Ypres and Vimy Ridge are now as distant from us as Waterloo was to Tommy Atkins. As we approach the First World War's centenary, they deserve our closer attention.

These were challenging commissions, having to fulfil formal, civic and public roles, while also retaining a gentleness and humanity. It is this accessibility, as well as their historic and aesthetic worth, which wins our respect today. Scholarly interest in the area can be dated to the 1980s, when the National Inventory of War Memorials was established under Alan Borg's aegis at the Imperial War Museum. They are increasingly being listed, and now benefit from the attention of the War Memorials Trust as well as a joint Wolfson Foundation and English Heritage grant scheme. Interest is steadily growing.

The Victorian cult of mourning was truly on the wane before the mass death of the Great War descended; what followed was a wave of commemoration as remarkable for its variety as for its size. And it was a good time for monument-making too: an exceptionally gifted generation of British sculptors, ranging from Goscombe John to C S Jagger, was at hand, able (for once) to benefit from plentiful commissions; the New Sculpture had re-animated the classical tradition of figural sculpture; consistently high-quality bronze casting was readily available; and the taste for civic embellishment and public modes of honour was at its height. Archer approaches the topic from a sculptural perspective, which complements the mainly historical studies we have had so far; we are given thematic chapters analysing aspects of symbolism, ranging from depictions of combat, of mourning and of victory. Above all, he makes us see more clearly the aesthetic quality of these memorials, and the eloquence of traditional sculpture. For once, the tale is not one of avant-garde triumph.

The Glorious Dead has many strengths. Its coverage is wide; many illustrations show little-known memorials; the pictures are consistently good; the social and aesthetic background is well rehearsed (there is a good chapter on depictions of women); and occasionally some more detailed analyses of individual memorials begin to illuminate the motivations behind memorial designs. What is still not clear is who made the design choices: was it the sculptor A G Walker or his Limehouse patrons who opted for a relief of a corpse-strewn No Man's Land, beneath a hyper-conventional statue of Jesus? More of these analyses would have been welcome. Subsequent scholars can tell the individual tales: Archer has now surveyed the field.