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

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

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.

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.

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 great difficulty is that you cannot be nice. If you want to take back the power, you have to behave in ways that are not conforming and will not be about pleasing other people.