He was surprised re-reading his articles how relatively nuanced his analysis was when it came to figures such as Mandela and, later, Obama. “My writing was actually less gushing than most. [There’s] a slight distance.” Later he says: “The nature of both my experiences and my politics and my interest in journalism is to look for the complexity … To try and get to the more granular stuff. So Obama or Mandela? It’s more complicated than just dancing in the street. Trump, it’s more complicated than ‘It’s just racism’. Brexit, it’s more complicated than ‘just xenophobia’. Things are usually more complicated than the dominant media narrative.” Younge’s breakthrough came when the Guardian commissioned him to cover Nelson Mandela’s presidential election campaign in South Africa in 1993. It was undoubtedly an exciting, but ominous challenge. Opposition to the white supremacist regime was one of the great campaigns of the second half of the 20th century. This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. There will be a signing after the event.

In his final year of at Heriot Watt he was awarded a bursary from The Guardian to study journalism at City University and started working at The Guardian in 1993. In 1996 he was awarded the Laurence Stern Fellowship, which sends a young British journalist to work at the Washington Post for three months. As a teenager Younge had attended Anti-Apartheid Movement protests outside South Africa House in London with his mother. And he went on to set up an anti apartheid organisation as a student at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He keenly felt the responsibility of writing the article. Racism and loss of empire played a big part in Brexit, he says, “but there were deeper things going on in terms of dislocation, economic disintegration, alienation … The centre of British politics was always happy to cede the immigration discussion to the right … While I couldn’t have told you which way Britain was going to vote on Brexit, the Brexit vote didn’t change anything that I thought about Britain. People were saying, ‘I went to bed in one country, I woke up in another.’ Not only is that literally not true, it’s not even metaphorically true. You went to sleep in a country where xenophobia had been allowed to run riot for years and then you woke up with the consequences of that. The difference is that you didn’t think that it was going to affect you.”Fragrant steam rising over a meaty grill’ at Mangal 1. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/The Guardian Gary has witnessed how much change is possible, the power of systems to thwart those aspirations, and compels you to ‘imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.'

It’s not like I go into these situations without a view on Brexit or Trump or immigration, but if you think that you have nothing to learn, that you know why people are doing this, that produces incredibly bad journalism He has observed a lot of changes since, he says. “With the boom and with the arrival of a kind of post-colonial migration, people started to assume that my brother was a Nigerian asylum seeker on the make.” Younge himself experienced someone shouting racist abuse at him from a car during a recent visit. “I’m reminded [of Noel Ignatiav’s book] How the Irish became White … Ireland [had] been peripheral within the European space, then got a different lease of life ... You see this rising racial hostility, but the other stuff hasn’t gone – that sense of, ‘We’re all immigrants’... There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant culture.” There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant cultureIn a rich mix of reportage, memoir and polemic, among other thought-provoking pieces, Gary asks readers to contemplate what a White History Month might look like and argues that all statues of historical figures, from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes, should be taken down.