On September 11 2001 I was lunching at the Connaught Hotel. I answered a phone call to be told that a jumbo jet had ploughed in to the World Trade Centre — the North Tower. I dismissed the message as tasteless fantasy and hung up. The mobile rang again and the message was repeated, the tone this time desperate as well as sombre. On my return to America Square, I saw hundreds of weeping grown men who had been ordered to evacuate the office; an emotional experience I would not care to repeat.
It seems extraordinary that a decade has passed since those atrocities were inflicted by al-Qaeda at 8.46 on that fateful morning. Those acts of terror changed all our lives. We need no