For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

The fight against unfair scheduling is like the fight for a regulated work day - it's people fighting for reasonable conditions at work and to have a life, so you can have some leisure.

The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn't about feminism, but it's a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men.

Men want to destroy the women: you've become bigger than me, people love you more, you have a public platform, that's my space you're taking up. I can't just divorce you, I have to destroy you.

When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.