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.

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

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.

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.

We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary.

One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given.

All of us are many different people over time. We have our childhood selves, people that we remember, but they're very different to our adult selves and the way that we create our own naratives is not that dissimilar, I think, to how a biographer structures their narrative of a life.