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.

The trade unions in the UK are campaigning around zero-hours contracts, which isn't about feminism, but it's a feminist issue. Women are affected by zero-hours contracts, and the recession has and is affecting women more than men.

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.

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.

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.

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.