The British aristocracy consumed human flesh, a new book on medicinal cannibalism reveals.

One's book of a lifetime should become a total obsession – a work that leaves you seeing the world through different eyes. For me, it's the unexpurgated 'Diary of Samuel Pepys'. Completing the 11-volume set challenges even the most dedicated, but the entries are so vivid and comprehensive that the readers feel almost as if we're living a parallel life.

Andrew Marvell was a great poet, but not an especially nice man. He had few friends, and did not trust people easily. He was also an angry man, and his immediate posthumous reputation was based on a series of sharp satires. As Nigel Smith shows in this profound and often moving biography, Marvell's anger came from hurt and disappointment. He grew up a clever clergyman's son in flourishing Hull, where he went to school with richer boys. Marvell's life illustrates the idea that to become a great poet some setbacks in youth are required. The loss of his father in 1641 in a boating accident left him desolate; he never entirely recovered.

Anthony Capella's gastro-romance explores the unexpectedly heated history of ice cream. When a young Italian kitchen hand, Carlo Demirco, arrives at the court of Louis XIV, he works with the King's "limonadier" perfecting the art of chilled cordials and sorbets.

The silly season is upon us. And so begins a three-part series dedicated entirely to hair – ready-to-hair!

When a public figure dies, the whole of his life flashes before other people's eyes. So hours after the Prime Minister's post-dated political demise, a kneejerk appreciation called Gordon Brown: a Political Life was rushed on to Radio 4. Yet although Shaun Ley's programme contained a perfectly comprehensive checklist of all the delights of Brown's years in office – Bigotgate, psychological flaws, Forces of Hell, moral compass, smile – it had a perfunctory air that suggested now was not the best time to take the measure of the man. And that is the problem with living in interesting times. Achieving perspective from the middle of a political avalanche is a challenge and the Today programme has coped better than most. Unlike the TV studios, where captive politicians can sit for hours repeating formulas on a loop, Today's presenters have been far sharper than their televisual equivalents. When Paddy Ashdown came on with a lofty peroration about how he could not possibly reveal his own position, Nick Robinson was as cutting as a kitchen knife. "We can hear what you're saying, Paddy, and so can the rest of the country."

As a clapped out-regime falls apart, "a young, charismatic man is called to power". But what happens when "the fireworks fade and the euphoria cools"? Jenny Uglow, the learned, stylish doyenne of biographers, turns her hand to Charles II and the decade after his 1660 Restoration.

The ballot counters sit facing the observers across the tables. Up in the bar, behind the glass wall, observers look down. I look up, observing the observers observing the observers. But who's observing me?

In the 341 years since King Charles II appointed John Dryden as his Poet Laureate, the title has passed along an uninterrupted line of men – some very gifted, but too many of them mediocrities, whose only talent was to pay homage to the self-important. In Carol Ann Duffy we now have a Poet Laureate who, as well as being the first woman in the post, and of Scottish working-class stock, has a wonderful way of puncturing egos.

One of the nation's best-loved poets and a favourite to take over as poet laureate has called for the position to be abolished.