Almost a quarter of a century on, is the US still being shaped by 9/11? Richard Beck thinks so, despite all the other shocking and pivotal events there since the 2001 attacks, from the financial crisis to the twin election victories of Donald Trump.

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.

In different, less globally calamitous times, the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh might have registered more forcefully. In September 2023, amid the horrors of the war in Ukraine, and two weeks before Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive to capture the isolated Armenian-governed and -populated highland enclave in the west of the country, a place it had not controlled since Soviet times.

A contribution to Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is part biography, part history and part literary and cultural criticism.

Christopher Hill was unmatched in his knowledge of seventeenth-century printed material, and avid in devouring monographs from contemporary university presses. He had a phenomenal power of concentrated thinking and intuitions that were sometimes inspired.

There are several dozen graves from the second world war (and some from the first) in churchyards near my village on Salisbury Plain, but all of them British or Commonwealth ones. Nor have I seen any enemy graves elsewhere, although some 4,500 Germans died on British soil during the last world war, and a far smaller number in the Great War.

The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror.

In addition to photographing the fans who flocked to Wembley for the Carabao Cup final, Orlando Gili interviewed writer, playwright and Newcastle fan Michael Chaplin about what it means to follow the Magpies.

It sounds a simple business. “I changed my mind.” Subject, verb, object – a clear, clean action, without correcting or diminishing adjectives or adverbs. “No, I’m not doing that – I changed my mind” is usually an irrefutable statement.

Arriving in London during the autumn of 1893, Emile Zola and his wife, Alexandrine, found themselves welcomed with the kind of pomp normally reserved for visiting heads of state. As guests of the Royal Institute of Journalists, the pair were whisked off to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the Greenwich Observatory and given a tour of the East End, whose slums seemed altogether less dismal to the novelist than those he had so graphically evoked in L’Assommoir.