Allan Krell. The Devil's Rope: A Cultural History of Barbed Wire. London: Reaktion Books, 2003. [Book review]

The Devil’s Rope by Allan Krell takes the ubiquitous cultural artefact of barbed wire and illustrates how it has become woven into the cultural imagination through various thematics. As a lecturer in art history and theory, Krell's interest lies in various images and representations of barbed wire, and the book respectively traces its various incarnations from colonial demarcation of boundaries to post-modern fetishisation.