It isn't easy to say new things about 9/11. Short of having Dick Cheney pitch up on screen and say, "OK... I'm sick of lying... we planned the whole thing in advance", it's quite hard to think of something that would really shake our received understanding of the event. But anniversaries come round and commissioning editors are as helplessly instinctive in their presence as a dog in front of a lamppost. So inevitably we get more documentaries in which those who were there run through the memories again. Channel 4 started things off on Wednesday night, focusing on the firefighters' experience, and last night ITV got in on the commemorative act with 9/11: the Day That Changed the World. Both of them replayed the same familiar footage of plane strikes and tower collapse (still compelling after countless viewings). And both of them captured the chaos and grief of the day. But what individual merit now comes down to in these things is usually fresh personnel and filled-in detail.

Combative vice-president's memoirs detail his battles with his colleagues

These days science is either nothing or it's the new religion. But, as both these books show in their different ways, the practice of science inhabits the broad territory between these extremes and exhibits the full Monty of human behaviour. Science is the most reliable form of knowledge we have but it is arrived at by unreliable means. Cutting-edge research deals with the unknown unknowns, as the unwitting philosopher of science Donald Rumsfeld put it, and there is no formula or methodology for achieving that.

A judge is allowing an army veteran who says he was imprisoned unjustly and tortured by the US military in Iraq to sue the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for damages.

Imagine feeling bitterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq at the same time as being the long-term partner of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's Chief of Staff and closest adviser. It sounds like an almost parodically privileged position from which to absorb first-hand material for a play that tightly intertwines the personal and political while also titillating us with its insider-insights and the splatting sound of old scores being settled. But Sarah Helm, a former journalist with The Independent who reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, has come up with a debut stage-drama, Loyalty, that stubbornly fails to catch fire, despite its clearly authentic detail and its flashes of bruised comedy.

Whether he's fighting Hitler or giving up his US citizenship, Superman is an ever-evolving character. Phil Boucher finds out about the Man of Steel's latest redux

It's a melting pot of fact, fiction and fantasy, where anyone can say what they like without fear of the consequences. So is Twitter making an ass of the law – or of the people who use it?

Casualties of war still under fire

There's a runaway plot heading straight for us

Even casual addicts of American politics are likely to pounce on Known and Unknown, the memoir that Donald Rumsfeld has been writing since resigning as George W Bush's Defence Secretary in 2006. Sentinel Books, an imprint of Penguin, said last night that it will be released in January next year.

While the emerging Bric countries are still attractive, Germany, France and Switzerland still have their place

Throughout the 1960s George Steiner published an extraordinary series of essays which argued that art, literature and culture were deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the first half of the 20th century. For Steiner the man who can read "Goethe and Rilke in the evening" and go to his "day's work at Auschwitz in the morning" throws into disarray the humanising claims of the humanities.

Memoirs to tell of Veep's change of heart in waning years of presidency

Campaigners and MPs express anger that the long-delayed inquiry into the conflict will not even apportion blame, reports Andrew Grice