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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.