Tell the Truth Shame the Devil

In this biography Francis Wheen for the first time presents Marx the man in all his fiery brilliance and frailty: as a Prussian Jew who became a middle-class English gentleman; as an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in scholarly silence in the British Museum Reading Room; as a gregarious and convivial host who none the less fell out with almost all his friends; as a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; as a deeply earnest thinker who loved drink, cigars and jokes; and as a prodigal son to whom his mother said, 'I wish you would make some capital instead of just writing about it.'
Karl Marx emerges here as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation.