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.

My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.

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.

People don't give up power and privilege out of the goodness of their hearts.

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.

Eleanor [Marx] was involved in the 1889 Paris congress resolution that established May Day as an annual demonstration of the international solidarity of labour in the demand for a legal eight-hour day.