Men want to destroy the women: you've become bigger than me, people love you more, you have a public platform, that's my space you're taking up. I can't just divorce you, I have to destroy you.

Eleanor Marx was a pragmatic person of actions and deeds and she was an organizer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.