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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.