an Carlin, host of the popular podcast Hardcore History, stresses at the outset of his latest book that he is not a historian but rather “a student of history”: an amateur status that grants him the freedom “to roam intellectual spaces” that are off-limits to academics cowed by the rigors of peer review. He uses this freedom to pursue big, slippery, speculative questions about the nature of humanity—questions that he admits are prone to bias and impossible to quantify. A different student of history might wonder if restricting himself to a smaller field of inquiry could yield more graspable and thus more profound answers, but not Carlin, who roams from ancient Assyria to nuclear-powered America with the wowed air of a college freshman who’s just discovered cultural relativism.

“People always believe the best story” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald in her novel Save Me the Waltz in 1932. For a long time, that story of the Fitzgeralds starred a brilliant, self-destructive golden boy tethered to a golden girl, whose glamour eventually dulled into madness. Then in 1970, Nancy Milford’s Zelda: A biography twisted the kaleidoscope and a new story tumbled into view, one in which a brilliant woman was overshadowed, plundered and abandoned by her husband.

Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrorized London’s East End in the late 19th century, may be the catalyst for historian Hallie Rubenhold’s fascinating new book, but he is in no way its subject. Readers who wish to linger over the bloody details of the murders or speculate as to the killer’s still-unknown identity will have to look elsewhere, in the rich seam of Ripper lore. This is a story of life, not death.

As the United States gets closer to marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, we can expect a rising tide of books analyzing the victory and its legacy.

World War I fundamentally reshaped America’s sense of itself and its relation to the world; it also helped form our modern understanding of citizenship, democracy and the role of the state. But in the American popular imagination, the war is a blank, a situation without a story.

The first militant act of the Women’s Social and Political Union was a dry-mouthed spit, “a kind of pout,” from 25-year-old Christabel Pankhurst into the face of a police officer, the only physical assault she could manage while her arms and legs were restrained. Her action, carried out in Manchester in 1905, got her labeled a “spitfire,” which pleased her, and arrested, which pleased her even more.

They were single and married, mothers and not, educated and self-taught, financially comfortable and struggling. Their work spans the second half of the 20th century and continues into the present. They did not know one another. But in her lively new biography of Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters, Andrea Barnet makes a compelling case that these women “changed our world.”

The simple definition of work—tasks performed for a wage under legally binding conditions, on a regular schedule—is in fact a rare and recent formula.

Throughout her life, where Wallis lived and traveled, what she did and who with, was dictated entirely by her man, or men, of the moment. No wonder she was furious most of the time.

Early in the morning, after finishing Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s hard-to-cat­egorize “Footnotes,” I am penned in a corral with more than 5,000 other runners in New York’s Central Park, as the sun heats up, music pumps and officials congratulate us through loudspeakers for supporting the charity of the day.

In A. Scott Berg’s book, and in the new film, the worn-out trope of the male literary genius gets one more day in the sun.

As a child, Blanche Wolf wanted more than anything to live a life surrounded by books. When she met Alfred Knopf in 1911, she was attracted most of all to his bookishness. Her dream life was simple, heartbreakingly so: “We decided we would get married and make books and publish them.” How could she have known that the hardest part of that dream was the “we”?

Imagine the plot of a romantic comedy: An English writer who has given up on love meets a man who asks her to move halfway across the world for him. That’s the prologue to “The Lonely City,” and you might expect (or dread) the ensuing story of a woman learning to love her single state, until she’s saved by a new relationship. Thankfully, Olivia Laing’s unusual book — part memoir, part biography, part cultural criticism — is less a predictable rom-com than a wonderfully melancholy meditation on modern art, urban space and the complexity of being alone.

The goshawk is not an easy bird to tame, to take under one’s wing.

It would be two years and two more serious romances on her part before Hepburn publicly partnered with Hughes, shortly before she was infamously blasted as “box office poison.” The gossip columns latched onto the story of “the damsel in distress rescued by a dashing aviator,” but they were more alike, and more equal, than that.