Quotes from David Olusoga

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

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

For black and Asian people of my generation, the England team and the cross of St George were once ingredients in a toxic broth. For decades, a minority of England fans brought the nation and the national team into disrepute, bringing violence both to foreign streets and immigrant communities at home.

History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.

The loss of the American colonies was the first time the process of British empire building had been put significantly into reverse, and became the starting point for a nostalgic yearning for lost colonies - and the wealth and global influence that came with them - that has become part of our national psyche.

Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing.

If you want someone to call you a traitor or accuse you of hating Britain, try suggesting that Britain is a normal nation or that our history is remarkable but not exceptional.

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.

Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.

I finally got to watch 'Roots' in my mid-teens, on a video rental. Slowly and meticulously Roots fed its black characters through the mincing machine of American slavery. People with names, hopes and family connections were destroyed and dehumanised before my eyes.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

There's always been a snobby dismissal of football and the emotions it elicits in millions of people.

Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London.

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.

At 18, I stood in the Louvre in front of the paintings that TV had first shown me.

Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

A hard Brexit would be so damaging to the true interests of the UK that what might follow - if we are lucky - is a great unmasking, not just of the political fantasists and chancers who peddled the great Brexit swindle, but of the historical delusion that empowered them.

The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.

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.

I think I was eight the first time I saw the Benin bronzes. I was taken to see them at the British Museum by my white, British mother, who felt it important that her half-Nigerian children learned about the artistic achievements of their forefathers. I've been entranced by them ever since.

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.