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.

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.

The fight against unfair scheduling is like the fight for a regulated work day - it's people fighting for reasonable conditions at work and to have a life, so you can have some leisure.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.