Tomb raider: a graveyard spider

KARL Marx, who died of a chest complaint in 1883, was buried on St Patrick’s Day at Highgate Cemetery in North London.

The dozen or so mourners, gathered in a section of the cemetery reserved for religious dissenters and agnostics, included Friedrich Engels, Marx’s principal collaborator.

The great social philosopher is not the only celebrity interred at Highgate. Three years earlier, the novelist, George Eliot, had been laid to rest there. Having rejected Christianity and lived openly ‘in sin’ with a married man, Eliot was denied a place of honour at Westminster Abbey.