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.

One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given.

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.

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.

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

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 goal of the first International May Day celebrations was the eight-hour working day.