The great difficulty is that you cannot be nice. If you want to take back the power, you have to behave in ways that are not conforming and will not be about pleasing other people.

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

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.

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 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.

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.