QI The Book of the Dead

communism. He began writing for Vorwärts , the most radical newspaper in Europe, run by a secret society called the League of the Just. When, in 1845, the paper heartily praised an assassination attempt on the king of Prussia, the French authorities ordered Marx, along with many others, to leave Paris. He went to Brussels and renounced his Prussian citizenship. From then on, he was officially classed as stateless.
    In 1849 Marx moved to London, where he lived in various degrees of acute poverty for the rest of his days. He came with hiswife, Jenny von Westphalen, a Prussian baron’s daughter (Marx was rather proud of having married a beautiful society girl). She called him her ‘little wild boar’ after the bristly hair that sprouted all over his body, as well as by his family nickname ‘the Moor’ from the huge mane and beard framing his face and his swarthy complexion. Marx’s health was a source of continual anguish. He suffered from liver trouble, rheumatism, shingles, ulcers, insomnia, bronchitis, laryngitis, pleurisy and, above all, gigantic boils on his backside, which meant that he had to pen most of Das Kapital , his colossal masterpiece, standing up. Engels always said he could tell the passages that had been written under the worst pain. Marx responded, ‘At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember the carbuncles until their dying day. What a swine they are!’ Like another stateless émigré, Sigmund Freud, he was addicted to cigars. In the later years of poverty, though, he was constantly pawning his clothes and furniture to feed his family. He adored his six children, of whom only three made it through childhood. The brutish, bullying intellectual, prone to getting into fights in the pub, was an absolute pussycat at home, with his offspring riding on his back, pulling his hair and being indulged with endless pets – three dogs, two cats and two birds. At bedtime he would read to them from his favourite novel, Don Quixote by Cervantes.
    The Marxs were always delighted when Engels knocked on the door of their house in Kentish Town, not least because they lived in constant fear of the bailiffs. The family affectionately called him ‘General’ or ‘General Staff’. As well as bringing money, he loved to entertain the household with ribald songs. Sometimes ‘Staff’ and ‘the Moor’ did duets, each singing one song’s lyrics to another’s tune. In 1868 they played a parlourgame where Marx’s daughter Jenny got both men to fill in her ‘confessions’ album. The contrast between them is revealing. Under ‘Your favourite maxim’, Marx put ‘ nihil humani a me alienum puto ’ (‘I think nothing human is alien to me’) while Engels put ‘not to have any’; under ‘Your favourite motto’ Marx had ‘ de omnibus dubitandum ’ (‘doubt everything’), while Engels preferred the splendid ‘Take it easy.’
    Marx spent thirty-four years in the Reading Room of the British Museum. After hours, he addressed small political meetings (where his lisp and heavy accent made him a rather underwhelming speaker) and then got drunk on beer at Jack Straw’s Castle on Hampstead Heath, the highest pub in London. Out on the town, he would sign his name in hotel registers as ‘Mr Charles Marx, private gentleman of London’. On one occasion, he and his fellow socialists Edgar Bauer and Wilhelm Liebknecht set out to drink a beer in every pub from Oxford Street to the Hampstead Road. There were eighteen pubs on that route: by the end, they were so inebriated that they decided to throw paving stones at gas lights, narrowly escaping arrest. Unsurprisingly, Marx was never granted British citizenship. A police report of 1874 declared that ‘he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.’ More intimately, a Prussian spy who had seen his family life at first-hand concluded: ‘Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk’.
    Engels and Marx conceived their history of capitalism, Das Kapital , in the late 1840s but the first volume wasn’t completed until 1867, well behind schedule. Marx died before he could finish parts two and three. These had been written with the helpof his daughter Eleanor (known as ‘Tussy’), who later played an important role in the early British Labour movement, and were completed and published posthumously