At this time, 25 years ago, traumatised emergency services personnel were still working an enormous pile of glass, concrete and torn metal, with its unknown cocktail of particulate toxins. Many would later develop lethal cancers directly attributable to their exposure.

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Day and night, they searched where two of the world's most recognised skyscrapers had stood, towering 110-storey monuments to America's primacy as the world's apex economic and military superpower.

The search for survivors and for human remains would go on for days, both at "Ground Zero," and in Virginia where a third plane had ploughed into the Pentagon.

The death toll from 9/11 is thought to be as high as 10,000 on top of the 2,977 killed in the planes and buildings.

Thanks to a routine airport delay, the trapped passengers on a fourth hijacked plane had called loved ones using seatback 'airphones' and thus became aware of the WTC attacks.

It was clear they were about to be used in the same manner against the Capitol or even the White House.

They took a vote and resolved to act. A steward suggested boiling up water from the coffee machines and armed with that and little else, they rushed the cockpit. In the ensuing fight, the airliner hurtled upside-down into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The heroic last words heard from a passenger on United Airlines flight 93 were "are you ready? OK, let's roll".

The country was in shock. The world too. Neither would fully recover.

It may not have been front-of-mind at that moment but Francis Fukuyama's provocative "end of history" thesis - first floated in a paper in 1989 and then popularised in his bestselling book of 1992 - also lay strewn among the........

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