Quotes from David Olusoga

What needs to be debated is whether IQ tests, as currently designed, are fit for purpose, and capable of measuring the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century among generations brought up with digital technology and different learning habits.

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.

Some of the problem with IQ tests stems from the inescapable reality that human intelligence is staggeringly complex and multifaceted.

Many historians will tell you that there are no laws of history and no great cycles that govern human events. History often appears more random than rhythmic. But if not patterns or cycles, there are certainly coincidences and some are so marked that they are hard not to notice.

The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven't and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.

Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.

Those of us involved in TV have a habit of using the word 'landmark' a bit too readily. I have been involved in a couple of television projects that, while we were making them, felt quite landmark-ish, but that in retrospect were just good TV.

I disagreed with my teachers on pretty much everything, including what grades I was going to get at A-level. I was sure I'd pass, they were convinced I'd fail.

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.

Britain went to war in 1939 in the name of freedom and democracy, but fielded armies within whose ranks were black and brown men who were regarded and often treated as second-class citizens.

Even in London, at the centre of the wealthiest region in northern Europe, in so many ways insulated from the financial realities faced by the rest of the country, the facts of austerity are becoming harder to ignore.

As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.

Historians are a long way from being key workers. The best place for them is at home, reading their books and keeping out of the way.

As one of the very few black historians who, from time to time, appears on TV, my daily life is a constant, open-air focus group.

In the Britain of 2019, around a third of a million of our fellow citizens are homeless.

As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.

In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.

Aside from his other achievements, Winston Churchill wrote a six-volume, 1.9m-word account of the second world war and his role in winning it.

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 most extreme among the Brexiters are convinced they can ride the chaos and deploy the 'shock doctrine' to remake the nation in their ideological image.

Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain's imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.

I don't have any personal memories of the broadcast of 'Civilisation'. I was born the year afterwards. But the many personal stories I have heard from the people it touched do resonate as I had my own television-induced epiphany.