David Olusoga

“Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action.”

“I have always been most drawn to those moments from the past when people from distant lands and different societies made contact with one another.”

“Racism is not primal or instinctive.”

“My first teenage holiday was spent touring the great art galleries of Europe after having been inspired by what I had seen on television.”

“Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.”

“The emotional compact between football clubs and their supporters is visceral and usually lifelong.”

“Very occasionally, I wish I was French. The fantasy usually materialises just after a holiday, when I dream of living by the warmth of the Mediterranean, or after a trip to Paris during which I indulge fantasies of being a Left Bank cafe-bohemian.”

“Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.”

“Each year when the A-level results come out, thousands of students and their families settle down to deal with the implications - positive or otherwise - of the fact that their actual grades differ from those they had predicted by their schools.”

“It is true that Britain and its institutions have survived past crises, but often this was because those in charge, at a certain point, snapped out of the stupor of latent optimism, recognised the dangers circling the nation and acted.”

“1819 was a year of hunger, mass unemployment, political repression and murderous, state-sanctioned violence.”

“Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real-world consequences.”

“It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment.”

“The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.”

“Ultimately, the naming of buildings is not a mechanism by which history is kept alive. It is a mechanism by which the rich and the powerful are honoured.”

“Donald Trump did not cause America's democratic crisis of faith, he rode to power on it. Once in control, he and other populists discovered their room for manoeuvre was expanded by the same disillusionment that helped them into office.”

“Britain fought the second world war with men and money partly drawn from the empire and that, after the defence of the home islands, the survival of the empire was a fundamental war aim.”

“The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.”

“When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.”

“By 1956, London Transport was recruiting in Barbados, even loaning migrants the costs of their passage to Britain. British Rail placed ads in the Barbados Labour Office and the NHS appealed to West Indian women to come to Britain and train to become nurses.”