Keith Richards’ war of words with Mick Jagger continued yesterday, when he admitted that his Rolling Stones bandmate had described his autobiography as “a bit bitchy”.

It seemed a mild term for a brutally candid memoir that mocks the size of the legendary frontman’s “todger” – a fact that was later disputed – describes him as “unbearable” and says he is worthy of the nickname “Your Majesty” for his diva-like behaviour.

While Jagger was busy lending his support to the campaign to save London’s struggling rock venue the 100 Club, Richards, 66, was promoting his new book Life, which has been praised as a smart, warm account marred by hurtful jibes at his old friend.

The famously untamed guitarist described writing the memoirs as the most difficult thing he had ever done, but yesterday said his band mates had given it good reviews – although Jagger had said it was “a bit bitchy here and there”.

The pair’s bickering has become legendary, but the Richards autobiography prompted some critics to speculate that such a pointed attack on his bandmate could sound the death knell for the Stones. The guitarist, however, was singing a different tune yesterday, insisting the band planned to tour next year and might record new material in December.

“Everybody’s ready to go out there again,” he told BBC 6 Music. “Who said it should stop, and who said when? Only we will know when it comes to an end, with a crashing halt.”

The Stones’ last world tour earned them $558m (£344m), but many feared it would be their final hurrah after several dates were postponed due to ill health within the band.

Richards said they were gearing up to record new material, adding: “After these many years working together, we have a lot of unfinished stuff to work on that we had to leave off the last album. And knowing Mick, as I do, he’s a very prolific writer. I have ideas [too] and we’ll put them together in December or January. We’re looking forward to working.”

The pair, who have been friends since they were four, have had a famously troubled relationship, frequently calling each other names. In the book, Richards compliments his song-writing partner at times, while treating him with contempt at others.

“I used to love Mick, but I haven’t been to his dressing room in 20 years. Sometimes I think, ‘I miss my friend’. I wonder, where did he go?,” he wrote.

Richards also wrote about the singer’s relationship with Marianne Faithfull, saying she “had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls – but it doesn’t quite fill the gap”.

Jagger, meanwhile, is supporting the campaign to save London’s 100 Club. Ironically, the Rolling Stones were not allowed to play at the venue in their early days, but finally performed an intimate gig there in the 1980s. Supporters, who are trying to raise £500,000 to keep the club open, include Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, the Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock and Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell.

They started as an aid for battle casualties and elderly people with failing eyesight. Now talking books are a publishing sensation, enjoyed by millions as an alternative to the printed word.

According to the most recent sales figures from the Publishers Association, downloads of audio books grew by 72 per cent between 2008 and 2009. Sales of talking books on CD, cassette and DVD also grew to an annual ?22.4m, according to the sales monitoring company Nielsen BookScan.

It all began very differently. Exactly 75 years ago today, audio books were first produced as a public service for soldiers blinded in the First World War. The Talking Books Service, an audio library run by the Royal National Institute of Blind People, was launched in 1935, when Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was recorded on to LPs and distributed to users, along with a large record player. Modern technology – particularly MP3 players – and a growing roster of high-profile narrators, have given the format a dramatic boost.

AudioGO, which took over BBC Audiobooks last year, is one of the UK’s largest producers of recorded books, and passed a landmark millionth download last year. Its publishing director Jan Paterson said: “The market is growing all the time. The portability of MP3 players has made more people interested in listening to books. The perception of the audio book as something for older people has changed because people listen to them while doing other things.”

The RNIB has been a major beneficiary, with the five audio books it offered in 1935 growing to more than 18,000 titles, which are distributed to 1.76 million Britons.

The actor Martin Jarvis, who has narrated hundreds of books, said: “I get letters from people all the time who say they listen to me in their cars or hear my voice coming from their children’s bedrooms. When I record I’m shooting a movie in my mind; I want the listener to forget they’re listening and imagine they’re there.”

Sir Duncan Watson, 84, vice-president of the RNIB, said: “I’ve been using Talking Books since I lost my sight at 16. They were on big records then and didn’t play for long, but now I’ve just heard Alastair Campbell’s The Blair Years on two CDs. It really gives you a window on the world.”

One day, after a heavy writing stint, I lay down on the sofa with a copy of Simon Gray’s diaries. I read 17 pages then I went to sleep. When I awoke I couldn’t see. Those 17 pages were the last words I read unaided.

The RNIB Talking Books Service lifted me out of the pit of misery. I went on holiday and lay listening to hours of beautifully read books. Talking Books helped me to realise that it was possible to be well read without books.

Talented talkers: Voices that bring words to life

Stephen Fry has made a fortune as the official narrator of the audio books for all J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series in the UK. His output pales, however, compared with actors Miriam Margolyes and Martin Jarvis, two of Britain’s most prolific recorders of talking books.

Jarvis was described by columnist Christopher Hitchens as like “a company of actors inside one suit” after he listened to his recordings of P G Wodehouse’s novels.

Roald Dahl recorded several readings of his own children’s books, including Fantastic Mr Fox and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, often beginning tapes with the words: “Read by Roald Dahl, that’s me.”

The tones of Joanna Lumley have also become ubiquitous on audio books; the actress has narrated everything from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to war poetry and Dahl’s Esio Trot.

Gordon Brown used the Talking Books service after an operation on his retina when he was 21 meant he was entirely blind for several days, while Margaret Thatcher also borrowed from the RNIB library after an eye operation. The actor Eric Sykes and poet laureate Sir John Betjeman also used the service.

Michel Houellebecq, the best-selling French author who has fanned controversy with his writings and comments on women and Islam, has won France’s most coveted literary prize.

Houellebecq won the Prix Goncourt, which had eluded him for years, for his latest work, La Carte et Le Territoire, which translates as The Map and The Territory.

“I am very happy … After all, I think it was necessary in my life. In any case, it’s a very good thing,” Houellebecq said.

Michel Houellebecq, the best-selling French author who has fanned controversy with his writings and comments on women and Islam, has won France’s most coveted literary prize.

Houellebecq won the Prix Goncourt, which had eluded him for years, for his latest work, La Carte et Le Territoire, which translates as The Map and The Territory.

“I am very happy … After all, I think it was necessary in my life. In any case, it’s a very good thing,” Houellebecq said.

Henrietta Lacks, the poor black tobacco worker who died in 1951 without knowing that her cells would be used to treat millions of patients through vaccines and research, could be the most important woman in modern medicine. Last night, she extended her dominance to the publishing industry.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the story of Lacks’ remarkable life and death written by the US science writer Rebecca Skloot, won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, a ?25,000 award celebrating medicine in literature. Skloot’s work has also been named Amazon’s Best Book of 2010, beating Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Henrietta Lacks entered the New York Times bestseller list at number five when it was released in the US in February, and stayed there for months; it was released in Britain in June to widespread acclaim.

“It’s wonderful that the prize has been awarded to a book that was such a labour of love for its author,” said Clare Matterson, director of edical hmanities and engagement at the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. “Rebecca Skloot’s work absolutely meets the objective of this prize. It has something of everything – a compelling science story, an emotional personal story and intriguing ethical dilemmas – and all woven together and written with style.”

Henrietta Lacks has been described as a “biomedical thriller” and chronicles the tale of how the 31-year-old’s dead cancer cells were removed from her body without her family’s permission when she died at a Baltimore hospital from cervical cancer.

After her death, scientists grew Lacks’s tumour cells in a laboratory, the first time a human cell line had survived outside the body. Since then HeLa cells (an abbreviated version of Lacks’s name) have been used to develop polio vaccines, in vitro fertilisation techniques and in genetics research, to understand cancers and to manufacture drugs for herpes and influenza.

More than 50 million tonnes of her cells have been grown since she died, and their use has been acknowledged in more than 60,000 scientific papers with 10 new studies added to the list every day.

Skloot charts the tribulations of her impoverished relatives, and the author’s obsession with the “Henrietta mystery”, namely how such an influential figure ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in a clearing just outside Roanoke, the small town in rural Virgina where she grew up.

Lacks was only confirmed as the source of the cancer cells in 1973, to the surprise of her relations. In 2001 HeLa cells were trading at $167 (?107) a vial. Her descendants have never received a penny from their ancestor’s gift to science.

“This cell line is used all around the world and revolutionised cell biology because they grew so well in culture,” said Professor William Earnshaw, principal research fellow of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cell Biology. “They are used to answer a wide variety of questions and yielded a huge amount of information. We use them to study how cells grow and divide.”

The story’s relevance to black society has made the book particularly appealing to parts of the US public. The treatment of Lacks has been portrayed as another example of the mistreatment of black Americans in the pursuit of medical science. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, carried out between 1932 and 1972, saw scientists observe how untreated syphilis slowly and painfully killed African American men. Penicillin, which could treat the affliction, was developed in the 1940s.

Skloot’s book has now sold 400,000 hardbacks in the US and Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood, are producing an HBO film based on the tale.

He started gently enough, travelling all of one-and-a-half miles from his house in North Dallas early yesterday to sign copies of his memoir, Decision Points, at a branch of Borders bookshop. Was he allowed to go home afterwards and finish his breakfast? Hardly. There will be no rest for George W Bush for many days to come.

It is not exactly a comeback tour – returning to politics is not in his future, he says – but there is no shirking the promotional duties that befall every author, even if he is a former president. Crown Books, the publisher, has ordered a first print-run of 1.5 million copies. That’s a lot of hardback copies to shift, and they want him out there.

Some of the blitz was cooked in advance. Over 24 hours, kicking off on Monday night, Americans got to glimpse their former leader conversing with NBC at his childhood home in Texas, tramping the fields of his ranch in Crawford with Fox News and showing Oprah Winfrey around the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Most critics agree that the book itself, which runs to fewer than 500 pages, contains little that will shock or surprise the public. “Competent, readable and flat” was the headline on The Washington Post’s review. The moments in his life and presidency that get particular attention include his abandonment of alcohol, the 9/11 attacks, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the economic meltdown and elections of 2008.

If the idea of the book and tour is to repackage and rehabilitate Mr Bush, who left office with such low ratings, then his hour on The Oprah Winfrey Show last night was the ticket. He was alternately self-deprecating, jokey and reflective. “Alcohol at times made me a fool,” Mr Bush told her, for instance, recalling giving it up at 40 and telling a story from the book about turning drunk to a “lovely woman” at a dinner table and asking what sex was like after 50. As for people saying he was “stupid” as president, it didn’t hurt him, he said, but it did his daughters and wife.

When probed by Winfrey about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mr Bush said: “I felt terrible about it and sick about it and still do.” He insisted, however, that the world was a better place with Saddam gone. Would he have invaded had he known the weapons did not exist? “That is a question I cannot answer,” he added.

The sometimes syrupy tone changed when the discussion turned to Hurricane Katrina and allegations at the time that the government was slow to help because the victims were mostly black. “To accuse me of being a racist is disgusting,” Mr Bush said, leaning forward and fixing Winfrey with a glare.

That the book will be a bestseller hardly seems in doubt. Six presidents (one still sitting) have managed to get to No 1 on the New York Times non-fiction list. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did it after leaving office; Dwight D Eisenhower and Barack Obama made the grade before reaching the highest office in the land. Two presidents – Ronald Reagan and John F Kennedy – also had No 1 sellers, both posthumously. On the other hand, Richard Nixon wrote no fewer than 12 books after leaving office in disgrace, but never made it to No 1. The man who replaced him, Gerald Ford, was a bit of a dud on the author front, though he tried. They write them, of course, to make sure they get to tell their story before less friendly historians have a crack.

A first sign that that there enough Americans still fond enough of Mr Bush to buy the book was right there at Borders in Dallas. Several hundred snaked around the mall where the shop is located; some had begun queueing on Monday and camped out all night.

“Many things happened during his presidency,” said Patti Woodward, who drove to the store at 6am in hope of getting in to obtain a signed copy and shake Mr Bush’s hand. “I’m thankful he was president at that time.”

Borders said that by 11am it had sold virtually all of the copies of Decision Points it ordered for the event. Mr Bush signed books for 1,300 customers – 500 more than planned – and 500 bookplates for those still queueing when he left.

Torture: ‘Three people were waterboarded and I believe that decision saved lives’

George W Bush’s defence of the treatment meted out to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his supporters goes to the heart of questions about the moral compass of the War on Terror.

Mohammed, a Pakistani and one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks, had been arrested in Rawalpindi and “proved difficult to break”, recalled Mr Bush. When the CIA director, George Tenet, asked permission to use “enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding” he had no hesitation in giving the OK.

Mr Bush’s justification for this was that it led to Mohammed providing information about attacks on targets in the US as well as Canary Wharf and Heathrow Airport in London. Waterboarding – which makes victims feel they are drowning through being immersed in water – was not, the former president held, torture or illegal.

A British court, however, would regard waterboarding as torture and illegal. It contravenes Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Downing Street stated yesterday that it came under the British Government’s definition of torture. Whether the confessions of Mohammed did actually prevent attacks on Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf is disputed. Kim Howells, the former Labour MP who chaired the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee until this year, took a different view. “We are not convinced,” he said. “I doubt that this, what we regard as torture, actually produced information instrumental in preventing those plots coming to fruition.”

Security sources said that Mohammed did, indeed, provide some information about possible attacks on those targets, but details remained sketchy.

How did British authorities deal with the intelligence obtained through torture? Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, in his first-ever public speech delivered last month, had insisted that his agents did not take part in any abuse. But, he also said: “After 9/11 the terrorist threat was immediate. We are accused by some people not of committing torture ourselves, but of being too close to it.”

Sir John said: “We can’t do our job if we work only with friendly democracies.” But the information obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was imparted by the UK’s staunchest ally, supposedly holding the same values. It just happened to have a president at the time who has a very loose definition of what constitutes torture.

Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent

The war on terror: ‘There are things we got wrong in Iraq, but the cause is eternally right’

President Bush never had much idea of what was going on in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is as true now as when he was in the White House. He blandly claims that “the Iraqi people are better off with a government that answers to them instead of torturing or murdering them”, as if torture has not been the norm in Iraqi prisons since 2004.

Nobody ever imagined that Mr Bush had much of a clue about the war he blundered into in Iraq or its impact in the Middle East. Even so it is breathtaking to read sentences such as: “The region is more hopeful with a young democracy setting an example for others to follow.” This appears after a week in which 58 Christians were slaughtered in a church in Baghdad and cafes and restaurants in the capital are empty after a dozen bombs killed more than 70 people. Eight months after an election in March parties have failed to form a new government.

To be fair, Mr Bush’s ignorance was shared by those around him. Perhaps it says something of the US political class as a whole that they underestimated the dangers of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only important exception was General David Petraeus, now in command in Afghanistan.

Mr Bush joins former US presidents, notably Bill Clinton, who believe they came within a whisker of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This supposedly happened in 2008 in the last days of Ehud Olmert as prime minister of Israel and Mr Bush as president of the US. It is not a convincing claim.

More realistically, Mr Bush says he considered an attack on Iran but was persuaded that it had halted its nuclear weapons programme. Overall this is thin gruel for the historian of Mr Bush at peace and war in the Middle East.

Patrick Cockburn

Tony Blair: ‘Some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did’

Seven years after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair remained joined at the hip. Sorry is the hardest word for both of them.

The former US president seems to have studied the former prime minister’s appearance before the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq in January. A headline flashed danger signals in Mr Blair’s mind as he was asked whether he had any regrets. He did not want the headline to be “Blair apologises for war” or “Blair finally says sorry.” So he said merely that he took responsibility for his actions.

Mr Bush has been through the same thought process. “I mean, apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision,” Mr Bush told NBC. “And I don’t believe it was the wrong decision.”

Unlike his soulmate, Mr Bush does not do emotion. In his own memoirs, Mr Blair pleads for understanding from his critics, saying: “Do they really suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?” In contrast, Mr Bush says: “It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn’t matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn’t matter then.”

Mr Blair was ready to ignore political opinion. Mr Bush offered Mr Blair a last-minute opt-out from the Iraq invasion when he realised it could bring his closest foreign ally down, saying he wanted regime change in Baghdad, not London.

Revealingly, Mr Blair replied: “I’m in. If it costs the Government, fine.”

That unquestioning loyalty might have surprised some observers at the time. But Mr Bush already felt he had a sense of his British ally’s character. It was a judgement he had come to on Mr Blair’s first visit to the US president’s Crawford ranch in 2001.

“There was no stiffness about Tony and Cherie,” he writes. “After dinner, we decided to watch a movie. When they agreed on Meet the Parents, a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, Laura and I knew the Bushes and Blairs would get along.”

Andrew Grice, Political Editor

The economy: ‘I assumed any major credit troubles would have been flagged by the regulators’

You and everyone else, Mr President. The excesses that were building up in the world of high finance over the course of the Bush presidency finally crashed into public view in the summer of 2008, with the fall of Lehman Brothers, and Mr Bush declares himself blindsided by the discovery that the American banking system was a house of cards built on crazy amounts of hidden debt. The resulting recession was the worst since the Great Depression and, as Mr Bush says, “one ugly way to end a presidency”.

Only a very few people predicted the scale of the calamity, and none of the mainstream experts, so it is not Mr Bush’s failure of clairvoyance that is striking. It is the professed faith in the power of regulators – from a man whose administration was deeply committed to a market-knows-best philosophy and eroded the influence of regulators wherever it could, to the extent of putting a laissez-faire Republican former Congressman called Christopher Cox in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission. For ordinary Americans, financial discussions around the kitchen table were indeed about jobs and prices, but also, let’s add, about house prices, about whether to move to a spanking new home, about the extraordinarily cheap mortgages available. This was the real-world evidence of excesses in the credit markets and the banking system. If only someone in the White House had connected the dots. If only.

Stephen Foley, Associate Business Editor

Hurricane Katrina: ‘The suggestion that I was a racist, because of Katrina, was an all-time low’

It seems odd that President Bush would choose an unkind comment by Kanye West, the hip-hop star, about his handling of Hurricane Katrina as the low-point of his two terms in office. Shouldn’t he rather have picked 9/11 or the moment he grasped there were no WMDs in Iraq? Yet, it is the parts of the memoir that show the human side of Mr Bush that work best, and this is certainly one of them. Mr West said the then president did not care about black people because he circled above drowning New Orleans in his fancy 747. “I didn’t appreciate then and I don’t appreciate it now,” Mr Bush says.

You can sympathise with his reaction. But that doesn’t mean critics will forgive him for mishandling the crisis, or should. Bush is now using this book to offer something of a mea culpa. “I shouldn’t have flown over and looked,” he told Oprah Winfrey yesterday. “I made a mistake. I should have landed. The problem is, when the president lands, resources are taken off the task at hand… I didn’t realise that a picture of me looking out would look like I didn’t give a darn.” The problem is, none of this will make those still without a home in New Orleans feel any better.

David Usborne, US Editor

Aids: ‘Critics said I started work on Aids to appease the right. Preposterous’

Bush’s contribution to the fight against Aids is undeniable. The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief committed $15bn (£9bn) over five years from 2003 to 2008 providing treatment with anti-retroviral drugs to 1.2 million people (since expanded further to 2.5 million). It has been called the largest health initiative ever launched by one country to address a disease.

But it was freighted with a moral code that critics said undermined its effectiveness. From 2006-2008, one third of the fund was restricted to abstinence programmes. The restriction caused a major split between Europe and the US over how to tackle the pandemic with Europe backing the ABC strategy – Abstain, Be Faithful and use a Condom. Pepfar funds were also denied to needle exchange schemes on the grounds that they could be construed as encouraging drug use, despite evidence that the schemes were a key defence against the spread of Aids among drug users.

Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor

His place in history: ‘I hope I’m judged a success, but I’m going to be dead when they finally figure it out’

Thus a breezy George W Bush spoke to NBC’s Matt Lauer in his main TV interview launching his book. And however much Mr Bush got wrong in the White House, his musings on history’s final verdict are spot on.

There are a couple of reasons why the 43rd President can afford to be relaxed. For one thing his reputation can hardly get any worse. Second, presidents, whatever their record, tend to be more kindly regarded with the passing of the years – especially in this era of relative US decline.

When he left office Ronald Reagan was widely regarded as a doddering old man. Today he is admired for the correctness of his judgment that the Soviet Union was doomed. Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton, and even Richard Nixon have seen their stock rise.

But for Mr Bush ever to be viewed a success a lot of improbable things need to happen. Iraq has to turn into an exemplar of successful secular democracy in the Middle East. An outside power must defy history by succeeding in Afghanistan.

If Mr Bush’s Manichean, either-with-us-or-against-us approach to world affairs is to be vindicated, a fresh wave of terrorist attacks against the US is surely required. Finally, the economy has to get a whole lot worse than it is right now – and for an extended period – for the pre-crash years of 2001 to 2007 to be recast as another vanished golden age. Stranger things may have happened. But not many.

Rupert Cornwell, Chief US Commentator

He started gently enough, travelling all of one-and-a-half miles from his house in North Dallas early yesterday to sign copies of his memoir, Decision Points, at a branch of Borders bookshop. Was he allowed to go home afterwards and finish his breakfast? Hardly. There will be no rest for George W Bush for many days to come.

It is not exactly a comeback tour – returning to politics is not in his future, he says – but there is no shirking the promotional duties that befall every author, even if he is a former president. Crown Books, the publisher, has ordered a first print-run of 1.5 million copies. That’s a lot of hardback copies to shift, and they want him out there.

Some of the blitz was cooked in advance. Over 24 hours, kicking off on Monday night, Americans got to glimpse their former leader conversing with NBC at his childhood home in Texas, tramping the fields of his ranch in Crawford with Fox News and showing Oprah Winfrey around the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Most critics agree that the book itself, which runs to fewer than 500 pages, contains little that will shock or surprise the public. “Competent, readable and flat” was the headline on The Washington Post’s review. The moments in his life and presidency that get particular attention include his abandonment of alcohol, the 9/11 attacks, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the economic meltdown and elections of 2008.

If the idea of the book and tour is to repackage and rehabilitate Mr Bush, who left office with such low ratings, then his hour on The Oprah Winfrey Show last night was the ticket. He was alternately self-deprecating, jokey and reflective. “Alcohol at times made me a fool,” Mr Bush told her, for instance, recalling giving it up at 40 and telling a story from the book about turning drunk to a “lovely woman” at a dinner table and asking what sex was like after 50. As for people saying he was “stupid” as president, it didn’t hurt him, he said, but it did his daughters and wife.

When probed by Winfrey about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mr Bush said: “I felt terrible about it and sick about it and still do.” He insisted, however, that the world was a better place with Saddam gone. Would he have invaded had he known the weapons did not exist? “That is a question I cannot answer,” he added.

The sometimes syrupy tone changed when the discussion turned to Hurricane Katrina and allegations at the time that the government was slow to help because the victims were mostly black. “To accuse me of being a racist is disgusting,” Mr Bush said, leaning forward and fixing Winfrey with a glare.

That the book will be a bestseller hardly seems in doubt. Six presidents (one still sitting) have managed to get to No 1 on the New York Times non-fiction list. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did it after leaving office; Dwight D Eisenhower and Barack Obama made the grade before reaching the highest office in the land. Two presidents – Ronald Reagan and John F Kennedy – also had No 1 sellers, both posthumously. On the other hand, Richard Nixon wrote no fewer than 12 books after leaving office in disgrace, but never made it to No 1. The man who replaced him, Gerald Ford, was a bit of a dud on the author front, though he tried. They write them, of course, to make sure they get to tell their story before less friendly historians have a crack.

A first sign that that there enough Americans still fond enough of Mr Bush to buy the book was right there at Borders in Dallas. Several hundred snaked around the mall where the shop is located; some had begun queueing on Monday and camped out all night.

“Many things happened during his presidency,” said Patti Woodward, who drove to the store at 6am in hope of getting in to obtain a signed copy and shake Mr Bush’s hand. “I’m thankful he was president at that time.”

Borders said that by 11am it had sold virtually all of the copies of Decision Points it ordered for the event. Mr Bush signed books for 1,300 customers – 500 more than planned – and 500 bookplates for those still queueing when he left.

A touching vote-winner – among children if not every adult – hit the bookshelves in America yesterday written by none other than Barack Obama, whose success in the best-sellers’ lists might seem nowadays to be more enduring than his popularity at the ballot box. The picture book, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, celebrates 13 American heroes whose qualities he sees in his children, Malia and Sasha.

Each double-page begins with a quality the president associates with those Americans in history who have inspired him. Thus “smart” is Albert Einstein, “strong” is Helen Keller, and “inspiring” is Cesar Chavez. His choice of Sitting Bull as a “healer” has assured that the book will not escape political controversy. The American Indian chief defeated George Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. It was a humiliation that some conservatives see as disgraceful rather than inspiring.

To protect the author from allegations that he has spent time writing for children while he should be governing, the publishers, Alfred Knopf, were yesterday quick to insist that the book was written before Mr Obama, took his oath of office last year.

If Ian McEwan and David Mitchell’s publishers were hoping to forget their Man Booker Prize snub earlier this year, then they will find cold comfort in the Costa award shortlist, revealed yesterday, which failed to feature either of their latest novels.

The four works to be selected for the novel award, which this year had the highest-ever number of 168 entries, were Louise Doughty’s Whatever You Love, about a mother’s quest for revenge after her daughter is run over by a car; The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale, which explores the moral dilemmas and consequences of its characters; Maggie O’Farrell’s 1950s story The Hand That First Held Mine; and Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies.

Murray was shortlisted in 2003 for the Whitbread First Novel Award – as the Costa Award was previously known – and his latest novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize this year.

Jonathan Ruppin, web editor at Foyles bookshop, who was one of three judges for the novel award, said the four books on the list were “fantastic stories that really gripped you and with characters that really engaged the reader”. But he added that he felt it had not been a particularly strong year for fiction. “We were not spoiled for choice in terms of books that were serious contenders,” he said.

Reflecting on the omission of Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker prize-winner The Finker Question and Mitchell’s work, he said they had both certainly been contenders, but their work was too cerebral to recommend to the masses. The prize has veered towards more commercial reads in recent times.

Among shortlisted works in other categories was Sam Willett’s debut poetry collection, New Light for the Old Dark, which took him 10 years to complete and which incorporated some poems revealing his experience as a former heroin addict.

Yesterday, he said he was delighted by the nomination and revealed how his entry into professional poetry writing had been a serendipitous one. One of his former girlfriends had sent off one of his poems to a competition, which he won. Poems which dealt with his heroin addiction comprised about 10 per cent of the collection, he added.

“I was born in 1962 and I became infatuated with drugs. I was taking my mum’s valium at the age of 11. I had dabbled for years but it was in my late 30s that I became a junkie. The addiction lasted long enough to blow up my life,” he said. Meanwhile, the first draft of Lucy Christopher’s book Flyaway, shortlisted in the children’s book category and featuring an unlikely mix of terminal illness and bird migration, was written when she was in her early 20s and enrolled onto a one-year creative writing course.

“My stepfather was very ill with cancer and I was trying my hardest to write but I couldn’t have any ideas.

“I was ill and switched on the radio to hear a programme on migrating Whooper swans,” she said.

“I started listening and felt the idea of the long journey that these birds take and the long journey that is a long-term illness, has similarities.”

The shortlists

Novel award

Louise Doughty: Whatever You Love

Nigel Farndale: The Blasphemer

Maggie O’Farrell: The Hand That First Held Mine

Paul Murray: Skippy Dies

First novel award

Kishwar Desai: Witness the Night

Nikesh Shukla: Coconut Unlimited

Aatish Taseer: The Temple-Goers

Simon Thirsk: Not Quite White

Biography award

Sarah Bakewell: How to Live: a life of Montaigne in one question and 20 attempts at an answer

Michael Frayn: My Father’s Fortune

Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Poetry award

Roy Fisher: Standard Midland

Robin Robertson: The Wrecking Light

Jo Shapcott: Of Mutability

Sam Willetts: New Light for the Old Dark

Children’s book award

Lucy Christopher: Flyaway

Sharon Dogar: Annexed

Jonathan Stroud: Bartimaeus: The Ring of Solomon

Jason Wallace: Out of Shadows