When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.

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

It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.

Ten Guinea Street is on a Historic England site.

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.

I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To describe someone as a pessimist is to issue an insult, whereas to be labelled an optimist is to get a pat on the back. To dismiss someone's argument as pessimistic is to suggest it is the product of a personality disorder, rather than careful analysis.

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

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.

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.

We nonchalantly expect that next year's smartphone will be faster and better than this year's, yet we struggle to imagine that society and our lives could progress at anything like the pace at which technology advances and we meekly accept it when things go backwards.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

What we're seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.