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.

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

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.

For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

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.

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

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