In a panic, he persuaded his most loyal follower to claim paternity, and the baby boy was sent away to be raised by another family.

For the real father, out of sight was out of mind, and for decades he kept the secret of his paternity.

Only as an adult did his youngest daughter find out that the young man, by then married, who had come to be her close friend was also her half-brother, and thus learn of her adored fathers betrayal.

It might be another contemporary scandal like those of John Edwards or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mary Gabriels hugely ambitious biography gives us a more human and more flawed Karl Marx than the stern patriarch, intellectual giant and revolutionary theorist we have seen before.

Love and Capital, which last week was nominated for a National Book Award, is also a a thrilling story, heroically researched, with passages on every page so startling, exact, moving or perceptive that I wanted to quote them all.

Hard to imagine that a weighty book on Karl Marx could be a page-turner, but this one is.

Historians have established the vogue for history from below, analyzing events in terms of the perspectives of ordinary people, rather than the theories and actions of the great and powerful.

For a great theorist of capital and economics, Marx was astonishingly improvident and ignorant about money.

As Gabriel comments, he recognized economy only when he wrote about it.

The family lived on the brink of destitution, begging Engels and others for financial help.

Letter after letter laments their desperate poverty, and the bailiff was often at the door.

But when he received a windfall, usually a legacy from a dead relative, Marx managed to spend it quickly on housing above his means.

His love for the working man knew no bounds, but his own family suffered from his readiness to sacrifice their needs to the Cause.

He was an affectionate father and husband, a passionate friend to Engels and others, but also capable of blocking out the problems and sorrows of those closest to him and retreating to the British Museum to pursue his great work.

Of the seven children, four (including his three legitimate sons) died very young.

His three beautiful and talented daughters dedicated themselves to their fathers grand idea, even at the cost of their own dreams, even at the cost of their own children.

All three chose men much like their father in temperament, but without his intellect or self-discipline passionate revolutionaries unable to earn a living and seeking handouts from the patient Engels and their own family legacies.

Eleanor took her own life with cyanide in 1897 when she learned that her common-law husband Edward Aveling had embezzled her money and secretly married someone else.

In 1911, Lauras husband, Paul Lafargue, killed her with the same poison and killed himself the same way a day later, leaving a suicide note that proclaimed Long live Communism Yet Marx does not emerge from these pages as an unlikeable Aspergers-like unemotional genius.

Gabriel shows how his remarkable charisma and drive had already emerged by adolescence.

During their long, tempestuous marriage, they moved frequently around Europe, suffering poverty, persecution and tragedy, but Marx kept on writing.

In 1851, he told Engels, I am so far advanced that I will have finished the whole economic expletive in five weeks time.

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