David Olusoga talks about history as if it were a lover. The study of the past is a 40-year romance that animates and excites him.
And like any infatuated lover, he sees the object of his affection everywhere. He sees it when he is out of an evening: “I love having a drink in Covent Garden and thinking about the Georgian rakes, drinking wine, looking at the same views.” He sees it as central to how his parents, a Black Nigerian man and a white woman from Newcastle, met: “It’s a classic story of empire . . . History’s about unintended consequences.”
You can understand why his partner, on a recent holiday to Cape Verde, wrongly assumed his ulterior motive for the trip was the islands’ history of Portuguese concentration camps. She “stormed into the bathroom with the iPad: ‘So that’s why we’re here!’”