THE SECOND PLANE

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for IThe/I IGuardian /Ibeginning, ''It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue ofLiberty: that was the defining moment.'' In the years that passed since then, he has returned to the subject again and again, in reviews (ofthe film IUnited 93/I as well as books), essays and two remarkable short stories, ''In the Palace of the End'' and ''The Last Days of Muhammad Atta''. All are collected here, together with his account of the time he spent shadowing Tony Blair for the ISunday Times/I. As Amis says in his introduction, ''If September 11 had to happen, I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also of desperate fascination. Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medic''s smocks of the Islamic radical?''