the multiplexes, starring Nicholas Cage as the fireman hero trapped in the rubble. It is the second Hollywood film on 9/11, and like Paul Greengrass’s United 93, released in early summer, has been hailed by the critics.
Neither movie, however, has taken off at the box office. It is The Looming Tower that brings both the villains and the heroes to life.
Once a teacher at the American University in Cairo, Wright starts in post-war decolonisation, the seed-bed of Jihad, with Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who is deemed the founder of radical Islam and who was eventually hanged for sedition in his own country. Qutb wrote the justifications for the slaughter of "infidels": but Wright also discovers how the same man wrote of his disgust at Western sexuality while a lonely, frustrated student in Washington, articulating the same tormented sexuality that consumed the World Trade Centre bombers.
Such threads weave their way through a narrative built around the lives of Qutb, his protege Ayman al-Zawahiri who founded al-Jihad, Osama bin-Laden, his rival and 
