“9/11”, said Pankaj Mishra, “will be remembered as a minor event. It was an atrocity, no doubt, but it did not change the course of history as much as people think it did.” We were sitting in his office, close to Highgate cemetary in London where Marx is burried, we talked about his book In the Ruins of Empire, which is as much a pre-history of the hatred of the West that led, among other things, to the attack on the World Trade Center twelve years ago, as it is a wake-up call to the East or for that matter the rest of the world: Brillant, important book, it was just a bit odd to talk about it right on the day, and in a city that had its own deaths on that date, and reading another book coming here on the plane and sitting infront of the Serpentine and late at Nopi, Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurant: Leaving Atocha, the haunting and funny and wildly original novel of Ben Lerner, yes, about the bombing of the Madrid train station on March 11, 2004. I was actually there that day, in Madrid, for a soccer game between Real and Bayern, and the way Lerner describes the daze and confusion of that shock, of that aftermath very well captures the mood of these days, the resolve to unite and stand together, and the lies that were further used to legitimize a policy that Pankaj Mishra would claim did more to actually harm democracy than the attacks themselves. What we witnessed was the beginning of the end of the West. It is an ongoing spectacle.