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 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.

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

Many of us have had that experience of being in love with someone and then they end up being your enemy and there's a stranger in your bed.

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

Before my book, the most common assessment of Eleanor Marx is "Yes, she's great but basically she's in the shadow of her father." Absolute bollocks. She fought him, she resisted, and she was not a kind of trocadateur of his ideas.