This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

My name is Johann Koshy. I'm a deputy opinion editor here at The Guardian, and I am the author of The Last Humanist,

how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis. What drew me to this story was very simple, actually.

The editor of the Guardian Longread section, David Wolfe, asked me if I wanted to profile

Paul Gilroy.

I hadn't expressed an interest in doing so.

I don't think I'd even spoken to David about this idea or about Paul Gilroy before. But I had seen Gilroy speak

once before at a vinyl bar in East London called Brilliant Corners, where he was playing records

and talking about each particular song. And it became clear what an interesting subject he would be,

not just because he has so much to say about race and racism and nationalism in Britain, but because

he is also a very interesting presence visually and hourly. As I mentioned, the PC has this amazing voice.

He sounds like a kind of late night DJ. And he also has a very interesting physical presence,

which is always a nice bonus for someone profiling somebody because the reader wants to get a sense of what they're like

physically as well, how they move through the world. We spoke a couple of times over Zoom,

because this was 2020 and 2021, and it was the height of the pandemic, but eventually we were able to

meet up first in Finsbury Park,

and later in Hampstead Heath, and after a while, after I think he warmed to me somewhat

and was a bit less suspicious of me than he was at the beginning of our interview process,

he suggested I go birdwatching with him on Hampstead Heath at the Crack of Dawn. And I think that was when I

finally knew that this was going to be quite a unique and worthwhile assignment. This piece was

published in the summer of 2021. It was about a year after the Black Lives Matters uprisings in England.

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