David Olusoga
Historian
1970-01-05
Quotes by David Olusoga
-
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.
Read quote -
There's always been a snobby dismissal of football and the emotions it elicits in millions of people.
Read quote -
The great untruth around which everything pivots is the idea that the defenders of these statues are the defenders of history and truth; while those who want to see them toppled or contextualised are the Huns at the gate, who would destroy national histories and bring down great men.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Some of the problem with IQ tests stems from the inescapable reality that human intelligence is staggeringly complex and multifaceted.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.
Read quote -
But Johnson's Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May's even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Given that his rousing speeches play on a perpetual loop somewhere in the back of the national psyche, and the bulk of the country is unshakable in its view of Churchill as the greatest of British heroes, how can the historian see him with any clarity?
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
The emotional compact between football clubs and their supporters is visceral and usually lifelong.
Read quote -
While everyone knows that London is both big and overprivileged when it comes to spending, the scale of its dominance is poorly understood. London is not just the biggest city in the UK, it is the biggest city in western Europe. It is also the richest region.
Read quote -
Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote