Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Racism is not primal or instinctive.
Ten Guinea Street is on a Historic England site.
I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.
Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.
As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.
The easiest way to make television authentic is to make it really authentic.
Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real-world consequences.
At 18, I stood in the Louvre in front of the paintings that TV had first shown me.
Talking about class and identity can be as divisive as talking about race and racism.
Black people are expected to be passive citizens, good immigrants, mute and grateful.
In the Britain of 2019, around a third of a million of our fellow citizens are homeless.
The emotional compact between football clubs and their supporters is visceral and usually lifelong.
Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.
Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.
There's always been a snobby dismissal of football and the emotions it elicits in millions of people.
Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.
1819 was a year of hunger, mass unemployment, political repression and murderous, state-sanctioned violence.
It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.
I am as much British, white and working class, my mother's background, as I am black and Nigerian, my father's heritage.
The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.
When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.
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.
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.
In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.
Some of the problem with IQ tests stems from the inescapable reality that human intelligence is staggeringly complex and multifaceted.
Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.
I never had a black teacher or lecturer, I never once met a black British person who held any sort of professional or managerial role.
Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.
My first teenage holiday was spent touring the great art galleries of Europe after having been inspired by what I had seen on television.
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.
After 150 years, Bristol's prime music venue is to finally change its name and thereby cut its link to the infamous slave trader Edward Colston.
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.
Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.
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.
When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.
Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible.
At its height, Rome's empire stretched right along the coast of north Africa and sub-Saharan Africans passed to and fro across its porous southern border.
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.
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.
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.
I've received tweets that I suspect people wouldn't have sent in 2015. Is that a changed country or is that people who are unpleasant feeling emboldened to speak?
History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.
The British deployed the men of their Indian army on the European battlefield from October 1914; the decision being made within days of the outbreak of hostilities.
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 went to school in the 70s and the 80s, and the last thing I expected of my schools back then was that they would be the places in which I would be taught about black history.
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.
Most people involved in the delivery of history, in universities, publishing, museums and the heritage industry, are aware that we have a problem with diversity and inclusivity.
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.
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.