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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.