My Best Books

This is an essential primer for bibliophiles, says Ian Sansom

Born in Buenos Aires, raised in Israel, a Canadian citizen, currently resident in France, the author of dozens of books and the editor of anthologies, Manguel is a true polymath, and A Reader on Reading is a kind of a primer, or perhaps a masterclass. It’s like listening to Barenboim on Beethoven, or perhaps more like being the child in the DH Lawrence poem who sits beneath the piano, “in the boom of the tingling strings / And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings”. The book is a compilation of reviews, lectures, essays and reminiscences from various publications and countries. The range and complexity of Manguel’s sympathies and readings is extensive and baroque; a concerto grosso.

Manguel begins, in the essay “A Reader in the Looking-Glass Wood”, in childhood. “When I was eight or nine, in a house that no longer stands, someone gave me a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.” The house is gone, but the memory of the book remains, “printed on thick, creamy paper that reeked mysteriously of burnt wood”. Manguel returns constantly to the idea of reading both as a place of refuge and as an escape route. In “Aids and the Poet” he writes that “For a reader, this may be the essential, perhaps the only justification for literature: that the madness of the world will not take us over completely though it invades our cellars . . . and then softly takes over the dining room, the living room, the whole house.” In “The Library of the Wandering Jew” he suggests that books are the compasses that guide us both in our self-discovery and in our exploration of the world.

But most of us know this already, though of course we couldn’t have expressed it so. (We like to think we could have done, but we didn’t, and we haven’t.) Obvious or not, these are only Manguel’s starting points – or his cardinal points. What he discovers and where he travels to is what counts, and he goes far and wide, high and low – to Borges, to Cervantes, to Homer, to pornography, to ebooks, to the history of reading and the future of reading, and back home again. In a casual aside he usefully defines his theory of interpretation thus: “the intelligent and inspired reconstruction of the text, using reason and imagination as best we can to translate it on to a different canvas, extending the horizon of its apparent meaning beyond its visible borders and the declared intentions of the author”.

It is very rare indeed for someone to have devoted their lifetime to making these complex and delightful reconstructions, to sharing and reporting on their experiences as a reader; much rarer, say, than the many who devote themselves simply to criticism, to judgment or to commentary. It’s so rare, in fact, that it’s difficult to know what to call it. Manguel might best be described not so much as a critic but rather as a devotee of reading; one thinks of Susan Sontag, or of Clive James – observers, admirers, enthusiasts. This enthusiasm leads to what one might perhaps describe as a sentimental strain in Manguel’s writing, though it might also accurately be described as morality, the imaginative extension of oneself and one’s sympathies to others. In his revealing essay on erotic literature, “The Gates of Paradise”, he argues that in “reading or making love, we should be able to lose ourselves in the other, into whom – to borrow Saint John’s image – we are transformed: reader into writer into reader, lover into lover into lover.”

Ian Sansom’s Mobile Library novels are published by HarperPerennial.

Terry Eagleton finds himself uneasy with a score-settling ‘autobiography’

There are some things, like clearing your throat or falling in love, that you can only do for yourself. Even Prince Charles can’t delegate dying or digesting to a valet. Writing your autobiography would seem to fall squarely in the category of the undelegatable; yet here we have an autobiography of Fidel Castro written by somebody else.

And not just any old somebody, either. Norberto Fuentes, one of Cuba’s most distinguished writers, fought with Castro in the Cuban revolution but later fell out with him, narrowly escaped a death sentence and now lives in exile. His revenge is to steal his former comrade’s psychological clothes, hijack his life-history and tell his story more truthfully than Castro presumably would himself. By donning the mask of his former political master, Fuentes can out-Castro him, confronting the reader with what he sees as the real rather than mythological figure. Fidel himself is a political fiction, an icon whose face adorns T-shirts; this novel masquerading as a life story claims to be the truth.

We know that autobiographies, like novels, slant and select. They are a kind of fiction in themselves. Even so, Fuentes maintains, everything in the book is historically accurate. This presumably includes his portrayal of the Cuban leader as a monstrous egoist, a man who drools over an obscenely detailed description of the French guillotine: “The blood spurting out under pressure from the approximately 40,000 jugulars and carotid and subclavian arteries cut during the course of the French Revolution in a procedure that took two-hundredths of a second from the release of the splendid blade . . .”

Yet the autobiographical technique is double-edged. Fuentes’s fiction brings Castro magnificently alive, thus making what he presents as his casual brutality all the more repellent. Yet in doing so it can’t help humanising the very figure it is out to discredit. Castro may emerge here as a cynical amoralist, but he is also something of a regular guy: shrewd, sardonic, finely intelligent and abrasively honest. He is not above the odd shaft of mordant wit. “In Cuba,” he tells us, “a man has reached full maturity not when he takes a woman for the first time but when his mother stops examining his pinga [willy].”

There are less jocular allusions to the male genitals here, too. Counter-revolutionary thugs, so we are told, castrated some of Fidel’s comrades and stuffed their testicles in their mouths. Recounting this kind of detail suggests that Fuentes has no interest in an off-the-peg apologia for the Batista regime. He is not some redneck refugee itching to repossess his Havana casino. Castro is not denounced from a rightwing standpoint. The only standpoint in this book is his own. Since this is an “autobiography”, Castro can only condemn himself out of his own mouth.

Fuentes achieves this with admirable deviousness. His strategy is to present us with a man so swept up in political drama that he appears to have precious little inner life, and thus precious little conscience. We learn all about the struggles in the Sierra Maestra, but almost nothing about the beliefs that inspired Castro to revolt. In a near 600-page account of one of the great makers of modern history, there is scarcely an idea in sight. In penning an enthralling adventure story, Fuentes manages to empty his enemy of self-reflection, and thus of conscience. What makes for good fiction, then, also makes for a damning moral judgment. It is thus that the exile achieves his long-ripening revenge.

Making history matters a lot to the book’s protagonist. “I’ve gone to great lengths,” Castro remarks, “to ensure that my personal history is also the history of my country.” Castro invents modern Cuba from scratch, rather as one might write a novel. In doing so, he “goes about the task of inventing my own monumentality”. What is most real about this improbable character, in other words, is that he knows he is a fiction. But he can at least become his own author, creating his own history rather than being a function of the history of the United States.

Revolutions, as Marx recognised, are inherently theatrical events, both more and less real than everyday life. The Cuban revolution, Castro comments here, was “a miracle of the imagination”. In all such mighty upheavals, fact and fiction become hard to tell apart, just as they are in this book. It is part of Fuentes’s achievement to make us more conscious of these ironies. Yet there is something disturbing as well as revealing about this blow-by-blow life history. Why invest so much energy in a portrait of your persecutor? How can this avoid paying him homage in the very act of cutting him down to size?

There is something curiously obsessive about Fuentes’s fascination with Fidel. Stealing someone else’s selfhood is a wickedly effective way of getting even with them; yet wanting to become someone else suggests admiration as much as antagonism. For all his imaginative ventriloquism, it is hard to feel that Fuentes is aware of these ambiguities, let alone that he has resolved them.

Terry Eagleton’s The Task of the Critic is published by Verso.

The letter from the secretary of state, Ed Balls, to school governors in England will have caused them even more confusion as to their role in the Sats boycott (Report, 29 April). As governors, we have been caught in the middle of a trade dispute between headteachers and the government. School governors do indeed have the responsibility of ensuring headteachers carry out their duties, but this does not necessarily give us the legal right to request those headteachers who choose to participate in the boycott to absent themselves from school. We have asked Ed Balls’s department to supply us with chapter and verse on the legality of this, but we are disappointed that we have not received anything which satisfies us. The National Governors’ Association does not support the boycott of the tests, but we need to be sure that the advice we give our members who are dealing with this very difficult situation is legally correct. Many readers will be part of the 300,000-strong band of governors; please consult www.nga.org.uk before you take action of the sort suggested by the secretary of state.

Emma Knights

Chief executive, National Governors’ Association

• We are children’s authors and illustrators opposed to the Sats. We believe that children’s understanding, empathy, imagination and creativity are developed best by reading whole books, not by doing comprehension exercises on short excerpts, and not from ticking boxes or giving one-word answers. It is our view that reading for pleasure is being squeezed by the relentless pressure of testing, and we are particularly concerned that the Sats and the preparation for them are creating an atmosphere of anxiety around the reading of literature. Resources now being channelled into testing could and should be redirected towards libraries, the training of librarians and book provision.

We support the boycott called by headteachers in the NUT and NAHT unions. There are no Sats tests in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. We deplore government threats to use legal action against a form of action which will give children more time to learn and will not disrupt their education in any way.

Michael Rosen, Alan Gibbons, Roger McGough, Cathy Cassidy, Bali Rai, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Darren Shan, Geraldine McCaughrean, Beverley Naidoo, Robert Swindells, Linda Newbery, Tom Palmer, Jean Ure, Mary Hooper, Tim Bowler, Sally Nicholls, Paul Geraghty, Lucy Coats, Fiona Dunbar, Tanya Landman, Bernard Ashley, Pippa Goodhart, Tony Mitton, Phiip Ardagh, Eleanor Updale, Malcolm Rose, Alan Corkish, Charlie Butler, Helena Pielichaty, Mary Hoffman, John Shelley, Sam Mills, ‘Mr Read’, Keren David, Tommy Donbavand, Jamila Gavin, Catherine Johnson, Jon Mayhew, Cliff McNish, Anne Cassidy, Jan Dean, Caroline Pitcher, Tabitha Suzuma, Ellen Renner, Elizabeth Kay, Anna Perera, Steve and Sue Weatherill, Nicola Morgan, Ann Bryant, Dennis Hamley, David Calcutt, Jane Ray, Chrissie Gittins, Tony Lindsay, Ros Asquith, Katy Evans-Bush, Heather Butler, Ronda Armitage, Cathy Cunning, Wendy French, Charles Lambert, Eva Salzman, Helena Nelson, John Hartley William, Ros Barber, Gwen Grant, John Siddique, Katherine Gallagher, Antony Dunn, Andrew Strong, Elizabeth Baines, Andy Seed, Isobel Dixon, R V Bailey, Frances Leviston, Anthony Williams, Christopher Reid, Philip Wells, Steve Skidmore, Anne Rouse, Naomi Foyle, Richard Rose, Pat Thomson, Steve Barlow, Yvonne Luna, Anne Cottringer

Authors Against Sats

• Ed Balls states in his letter to governors that two-thirds of the heads did not vote to boycott the tests. This is obviously someone who does not understand democracy. Ed Balls won his seat in 2005 with 51.2% of the vote in Normanton. With a 57.5% turnout that means 29.44% of the voters voted for him – or in reverse 70.56% did not vote for him, over two-thirds – but he would still claim that this was a legitimate mandate for him to act as MP.

Philip Percival

Brackley, Northamptonshire

He is that rare university professor: expert, politically engaged and able to explain simply why his subject matters

Ever since Gillian Duffy asked Gordon Brown this week where “all these eastern Europeans are … flocking from”, rightwing commentators have been peddling a line about how immigration is the issue that none dare discuss. Yet national newspapers have published over 200 articles on the subject in the past three weeks alone, and it was recently the subject of an hour-long BBC1 programme. Open some papers and one might think there was no bigger issue than immigration. But there is another I-word that matters far more, and which barely gets a mention: inequality. Thank goodness then for Danny Dorling, who has spent the past 20 years studying the wealth gap. In his new book Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, the academic analyses a contemporary scandal. London, he reports, is the most unequal city in the developed world, with the top tenth of residents having 273 times the wealth of the bottom tenth. When he handed in his manuscript, Dorling thought he had written a bland account of the gap between rich and poor. The publisher told him it was “very angry”. And how. Dorling is that rare university professor: expert, politically engaged and able to explain simply why his subject matters. He describes modern Britain as the most unequal society since Dickens’s times, and picks apart the orthodoxies that allow such unfairness. “I’m hardly saying, ‘We want a revolution, we want a utopia,’” he recently told this paper. “I’m just saying, ‘Can we be slightly less stupid, and we’ll all be better off for it.’” Hear hear.

The Guardian’s health editor introduces our health factfile - and the full dataset behind it
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Health, as the work of Professor Sir Michael Marmot most recently eloquently demonstrated, is in no small part a function of where and to whom you were born. The most deprived communities, where jobs are low-paid if not scarce and those who make it to university are a talking point rather than the norm, are also those where cancer rates, heart disease and strokes are high. One government after another has been uncomfortably aware of this and made promises to do something about it. It has always defeated them.

But while the health inequality gap persists, the UK’s health overall has been getting better. Comprehensive childhood immunisation programmes have virtually wiped out some diseases. Smoking has become the number one public health target, and although we still struggle to get certain groups - young women and people in those deprived areas particularly - to quit, the public smoking ban, high taxes and campaigns have had an impact that must show up in lower rates of lung and other cancers and reduced heart disease. Diagnosis and treatment of cancer has improved - even if we still trail much of Europe in death rates. The politicians (and the drug companies) argue that is because we don’t buy the newest, most expensive cancer drugs. The cancer tsar, Professor Mike Richards, will tell you it is because we are slow to diagnose the disease, especially in those deprived areas (again) where men and women do not stride into the GP’s surgery demanding attention.

In recent years, the health gap has become visible, manifesting itself in obesity, which is often most rife among those with less money and less education, who are more likely to buy affordable and filling pie and chips than a smoked salmon bagel. Obesity puts people at risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer - the big killers of our age.

To make a momentous improvement in the health of the nation today, those social inequalities have to be addressed. Yes - we are all living longer but, to misquote George Orwell, one of our greatest critics of social inequality, some of us are living longer than others.

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As he limbers up for the philosophers’ football rematch, Julian Baggini analyses the existential importance of Monty Python’s classic sketch

It’s perhaps the second most famous football moment in English history. In the 90th-minute of play at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in September 1972, a commentator with cut-glass BBC English is going ballistic. “Socrates has scored!” cries Michael Palin. “The Greeks are going mad! Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes. The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant, via the categorical imperative, is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.”

Not quite as pithy as Ken Wolstenholme’s “they think it’s all over”, but that was the joke behind Monty Python’s philosophers’ football match, in which for 89 minutes the players wander around too lost in thought to actually kick the ball. Until, that is, Archimedes has his “Eureka!” moment. “The clash of two opposites is the whole point,” former Python Terry Jones tells me. “You can’t think about football too much, you just have to do it.”

Now Python, philosophy and football are set to come together once more to pay tribute to the original sketch. For the sake of the ticket-buying public, let’s hope the philosophers who boot up in north London on 9 May are a little more energetic than the originals. I will be playing centre-back for the Greeks, along with some frighteningly young-looking academics, comedians Mark Steel and Tony Hawks, and the historian Bettany Hughes. A similar mix of academics and celebrities, including Arthur Smith, are playing for the Germans. But while our side is being led by the former England manager Graham Taylor, the Germans have got lion-maned philosopher AC Grayling as their coach. That’s us doomed, then.

The serious point of the match is to promote the teaching of philosophy in schools as the “fourth R” – reasoning. Those looking for a serious point in the original, however, are probably as guilty of thinking too much as the hapless players.

The sketch was filmed in Germany while making the second of two episodes of Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus. “John and Eric [Idle], as the two keenest football players, had a great time setting up the goal-scoring,” recalls Jones. Idle was clearly proud of their handiwork: “I remember Cleesey crosses from the right and I scored a great diving header,” he says in the Pythons’ autobiography. “I keep telling Gary Lineker, and he keeps promising he’s going to show it in the best goals of the last millennium because it’s not a bad header.” Jones remembers “running out on to the pitch as Karl Marx was a great feeling of empowerment”, but does not see any deep significance in the choice of football. The only reason it was funnier than some of the alternatives, he says, is that “football is a team activity which philosophy, as a general rule, isn’t”.

Some have tried to link philosophy and football before. Ardent England fan Mark Perryman has been successfully selling his philosophy Football T-Shirts for years, featuring quotes such as: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football” by real-life goalkeeper Albert Camus.

But, as the Python oeuvre attests, the combination of philosophy and comedy goes far deeper. Jones recalls John Cleese as being the most interested in the subject, and he is on record as saying that comedy and deep thought can go hand in hand. “You and I could talk about the meaning of life, or education, or marriage,” Cleese once told a journalist, “and we could be laughing a lot, and it doesn’t mean that what we’re talking about isn’t serious.”

At the risk of this all getting silly, I’d go so far as to say that Python represents a coherent, Anglo-Saxon take on existentialism. French thinkers such as Camus and Sartre recognised the absurdity of life, but it took the English Pythons to show that the right response is to laugh at it.

Of course, that’s not to say they set out to be philosophers. “We certainly weren’t trying to preach, or even teach,” says Jones. “We were just trying to do incongruous things, I guess.” That sounds very much like what Bertrand Russell described as the aim of philosophy: “To start with something so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, and to end up with something so absurd that no one will believe it” – a likely description, I fear, of my performance on 9 May.

Julian Baggini is editor of the Philosophers’ Magazine

Waterstone’s reports dramatic rise in sales, with Liberal Democrats shifting 250% more copies than at the 2005 general election

With just over a week to go before the general election, pollsters and scryers of all sorts are feverishly trying to predict the result, but one intriguing rune has so far remained mostly unread: sales of party manifestos. These are enjoying an unusual boom, according to the latest figures, with the Liberal Democrats undergoing a remarkable surge.

Waterstone’s said that sales of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos have already overtaken the total achieved during the 2005 general election by 160%. Were these sales to correlate with vote-casting, the Lib Dems would have reason to cheer, with their manifesto sales up 250% compared to five years ago. The Tory manifesto has nearly doubled its sales, up 193% from 2005, with Labour yet to overtake its 2005 performance with sales at 97% compared to the last election.

The Conservative manifesto has performed the best of the three, taking 38% of total sales, with the Lib Dems on 32% and Labour bottom on 30% at Waterstone’s.

The first political debate on 15 April provided a huge boost to sales of the Liberal Democrat manifesto, Waterstone’s said, with the party top that week with 36% of sales, Labour second with 34% and the Tories last with 30%. Although Waterstone’s would not give out actual sales figures the bookseller said that each manifesto made it into its non-fiction bestseller chart’s top 20.

“This is clearly the most important election in a generation,” said the book chain’s politics buyer Andrew Lake. “I’ve worked in books for nearly 20 years and have never seen such demand for manifestos. These titles are outselling some of Waterstone’s bestselling authors, including Nick Hornby and Sarah Waters, and sales show no sign of abating.”

It would, however, take some effort to read this as a mass revival of interest in politics: in the UK as a whole, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, the Conservatives have sold just 1,653 copies of their manifesto since it went on sale on 13 April, the Liberal Democrats 1,142 and the Labour party 1,044.

Solar, the Booker winner’s ecological satire, joins shortlist for award celebrating the ‘comic spirit’ of the Jeeves author

Ian McEwan’s climate change comedy, Solar, has earned its first shot at a literary award, after booking its place on the shortlist for the 2010 Wodehouse prize.

In a validation of McEwan’s decision to move towards more comic writing and “play around at the edges of realism … [to] be slightly less sober”, the judges have selected it as one of the five novels of the past year that have captured the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse.

The director of the Hay festival and Wodehouse judge Peter Florence paid tribute to McEwan’s humour, citing him along with Margaret Atwood as a writer who is “never recognised for how funny he is”. For Florence, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Amsterdam have moments of uncomfortable humour which he has developed into the full-blown satire of Solar, with its short, fat, philandering physicist in search of a technological fix to looming climate catastrophe – a character described by Florence as “a grotesque version of us”.

Florence was unwilling to sum up the spirit of Wodehouse which the prize rewards, suggesting that “you can’t put it into 47 volumes”.

“It’s very easy to get tears and plaudits for tragedy,” he said, “but comedy is much harder to celebrate.”

McEwan is joined on a diverse shortlist by Paul Murray, Tiffany Murray, David Nicholls and Malcolm Pryce, with novels that range from a darkly comic investigation of a schoolboy’s death to the latest instalment of the adventures of an Aberystwyth private detective.

“These are books which we thought used comedy in very interesting ways,” explained Florence. “They range from the quiet humour of Tiffany Murray to the satirical savagery of Ian McEwan or the sustained, gentle, witty, wry humour of David Nicholls.

The winner will be announced at the Guardian Hay festival, and will receive a jereboam of champagne, a set of the Everyman Wodehouse as well as getting a locally-raised Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after the winning book. Florence is joined on the judging panel by the broadcaster James Naughtie and the publisher of Everyman David Campbell.

Previous winners include Will Self, Michael Frayn and Jasper Fforde, though McEwan will no doubt be hoping to follow in the footsteps of the 2003 winner. After taking home the Wodehouse in May with his debut novel, Vernon God Little, in October DBC Pierre went on to win the Booker prize.

Canongate, £14.99

And lo! Dawkins begat Hitchens begat Pullman, and Pullman went off to his desk for 40 long minutes to knock up an alternative Bible to give the Church a right kicking and make a few quid for himself at the same time.

This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ. As the world knows, their mother was called Mary. She was simple and good, and an angel commanded an old codger called Joseph to take her as his bride. “But I am too old to make her with child,” said Joseph. “Luckily, I’m not,” the angel replied. “Fair enough,” Joseph did answer and nine months later Mary did give birth to twins.

The eldest was strong and healthy and Mary did call him Jesus; the youngest was a sickly child whom Mary called Christ, which is Greek for Nick Clegg. Time went past and the two boys grew up. Jesus was a bit of a scally and was always getting into trouble, while Christ was a goody-goody who performed miracles and got his brother out of scrapes. Yet Jesus did not give a toss about his brother and Christ was very sad.

On the day that Jesus was baptised Christ saw a dove fly out of Jesus’s head but Jesus did not notice and went off into the wilderness. Christ went to find him and told his brother he had been chosen by God to lead his people and that if he could only be bothered to do a few stunts and impress the locals he could establish a church that would last for thousands of years. “Just think,” said Christ, “We could stiff people for shed loads of money, we could wear poofy clothes, start wars and abuse as many kids as we like.” But Jesus said he wasn’t bothered with any of this, as it wasn’t what God wanted.

Then a Stranger who had no name but was obviously the Devil, or possibly the Pope, came to Christ and said he was bang-on with his idea of a Church that could stiff people for lots of money and start wars. “And don’t forget abusing the kids,” said Pullman who was hiding behind a rock. “Quite,” replied the Stranger testily. “So just tag along behind Jesus and write down everything he does, only don’t bother too much with the truth cos the punters will only remember the sexed-up bits.”

Verily, The Sun of Man was born, only it was called the Bible and for three long years, while Jesus hung around smoking dope and saying peace and love, Christ invented a stack of miracles out of perfectly ordinary things Jesus had done and wrote them down along with a few deep sayings. And lo! The people loved it and Jesus had quite a posse.

Yet even though Pullman’s satire was totally without subtlety, Pullman was still sore afraid his readers were too stupid to get the message. “Remember the parable of the sledgehammer and the nut,” he said unto Christ. And lo. Christ went and slept with a prostitute whom he didn’t cure of cancer and then abused some kids, while Jesus was off being quite nice to people.

And the Stranger returned to Christ and said, if we want to create a Church where we make ourselves mucho dinero and start wars – “Don’t forget the child abuse,” Pullman shouted – then Jesus has to die because we need one last massive stunt. “But surely then the game is over,” replied Christ. “Not at all,” the Stranger laughed, “because you are going to be his body double.”

So Christ betrayed Jesus with a kiss and Jesus was crucified. Christ felt a wee bit guilty but was sure Jesus would understand and on the third day Christ claimed to be Jesus. And even though he had no stigmata and didn’t look much like Jesus all the apostles fell for it and spread the word of the miracle of the Resurrection. “Nice one,” said the Stranger, finalising the plans for the Vatican and the Inquisition.

And when Christ had got bored of being resurrected he put on some rocket boots and went into heaven, where he hung around waiting for Gary Glitter and several thousand priests.

Digested read, digested: Here endeth the lesson.

Former US president writes about ‘never-before-heard detail’ of 9/11, his alcoholism, and mistakes and achievements while in White House

The autobiography of George W Bush will go on sale in November, offering the former US president’s take on the September 11 terrorist attacks, as well as personal issues such as his battle with alcoholism.

The cover of the book, entitled Decision Points, features Bush standing alone in the White House’s rose garden colonnade holding a presidential briefing book.

Bush has said the book will not be a memoir but an account of key decisions in his presidency and personal life. According to Crown Publishers, it will offer “gripping, never-before-heard detail” on 9/11 and the 2000 presidential election as well as his decision to quit drinking and insights into his family life.

“Since leaving the Oval Office, President Bush has given virtually no interviews or public speeches about his presidency,” Crown said in a statement. “Instead, he has spent almost every day writing Decision Points.”

A publishing industry source said Bush had completed a first draft and was editing the manuscript at his office in Dallas. A former White House speechwriter, Chris Michel, is helping. The source was unsure whether Bush had compared notes with his wife, Laura Bush, whose memoir comes out 4 May.

Bush was known for not acknowledging errors, but Crown said he “writes honestly and directly about his flaws and mistakes, as well as his historic achievements.”

The former president will promote Decision Points through a tour of the US.

The tome will sell for $35 (£23). One thousand signed, clothbound copies will also be available for $350 each.