After her many years of uncompromising and brutal interviews, Fallaci turned to fictionalised accounts of her life, including a novel (Inshallah) based on her experiences of the civil war in Lebanon. In the 1990s she retreated into an ever greater solitude, living above her publisher’s shop in New York and working on a novel about her family and childhood. When 9/11 happened one of the things it did was to waken this dormant literary volcano in Manhattan. Within a fortnight she had completed a long essay that made up a special supplement of the Italian paper Corriere della Sera. It was a characteristically tumultuous, heartfelt, torrential and furious assault: on the people who had brought down the Twin Towers, on the people who had turned a blind eye to the threat, on the Muslims around the world who celebrated the act and on the religion of Islam itself. It was a distinct and passionate production.17

That edition of Corriere sold out and Fallaci swiftly turned the polemic into a short book published in 2002. The Rage and the Pride sold more than a million copies in Italy and hundreds of thousands more copies in translations across Europe. It was the subject of vicious counterattacks from the outset, and fierce defences in her homeland from the religious as well as those like Fallaci who were atheists. In the ebb and flow of intellectual and political fashions it is easy to forget or dismiss as ‘overnight sensations’ works like The Rage and the Pride. But almost no work had such a wide and powerful impact on its readers or retained such a strong effect away from polite society.

Taking, by her own admission, the form of a ‘J’accuse’ or sermon to the West, Fallaci’s work attacked those who carried out terror in the name of Islam, on the increasing number of Muslims in the West and on those in the West who ‘have no balls’ to stand up for themselves against these incomers.18 ‘I am very, very, very angry. Angry with a rage which is cold, lucid, rational,’ she wrote at the beginning. ‘A rage which eliminates any detachment, any indulgence, which orders me to answer them and to spit in their face.’19 The pitch did not lower from there.