Although its most famous occupant in the east cemetery is probably Karl Marx (whose tomb's attempted bombing in the 1970s is still recalled by some Highgate residents), there are many other prominent figures, Victorian and otherwise, buried at Highgate Cemetery. Interments include:

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and other novels

Edward Hodges Baily, sculptor

Beryl Bainbridge, novelist

Farzad Bazoft, journalist, executed by Saddam Hussein's regime

Jeremy Beadle, TV presenter, writer and producer, "curator of oddities"

Jacob Bronowski, scientist, creator of the television series The Ascent of Man

Robert William Buss, artist and illustrator

Patrick Caulfield, painter and printmaker known for his pop art canvasses

Robert Caesar Childers, oriental scholar and writer

Lucy Clifford, British novelist and journalist, the wife of William Kingdon Clifford

William Kingdon Clifford, mathematician and philosopher

John Singleton Copley, Lord Chancellor and son of the American artist

Sir Charles Cowper, Premier of NSW, Australia (1857–1859)

Charles Cruft, founder of Crufts dog show

John Dickens and Elizabeth Dickens, parents of Charles and models for Micawber and Mrs Nickleby

The Druce family vault, one of whose members was (falsely) alleged to have been the 5th Duke of Portland.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist

Claire Epstein, doctor

Michael Faraday, physicist

Paul Foot, campaigning journalist

William Friese-Greene, cinema pioneer. The memorial is credited to Edwin Lutyens

Stella Gibbons, novelist

Lou Gish, actress, daughter of Sheila Gish

Sheila Gish, actress

Robert Grant VC. soldier and police constable

Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness and other novels

Mansoor Hekmat, Communist leader and founder of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran and Worker-Communist Party of Iraq

James Holman, sightless 19th-century adventurer known as "the Blind Traveller"

Claudia Jones, black communist and fighter for social justice

George Henry Lewes, critic

Alexander Litvinenko, Russian dissident turned critic, murdered by poisoning in London

Charles Lucy, artist

Anna Mahler, sculptress

Frank Matcham, theatre architect

Carl Mayer, Austrian-German screenwriter of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Sunrise

Malcolm McClaren, performer, impresario, manager of The Sex Pistols, 'godfather of punk'

Ralph Miliband, left wing political theorist, father of David Miliband and Ed Miliband

Henry Moore, (1841–93), marine painter

Dachine Rainer, poet and anarchist

Sir Ralph Richardson (1902–83), actor

Christina Rossetti, poet

Frances Polidori Rossetti, mother of Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Michael Rossetti

William Michael Rossetti, co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Raphael Samuel, historian

Thomas Sayers, Victorian pugilist

Elizabeth Siddal, wife and model of artist/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Sir Donald Alexander Smith, Canadian railway financier and diplomat

Herbert Spencer, evolutionary biologist and laissez-faire economic philosopher

Sir Leslie Stephen, critic, first editor of the DNB, father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Feliks Topolski, Polish-born British expressionist painter

Arthur Waley, translator and oriental scholar

Max Wall, comedian and entertainer

George Wombwell, menagerie exhibitor

Mrs Henry Wood, author

Adam Worth, criminal and possible inspiration for Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Professor Moriarty

Patrick Wymark, actor