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.

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.

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

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.

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.