Cover Stories: Bill Clinton; Orion Group

Bill Clinton played an admirable supporting role to his Senator wife Hillary during her visit to promote her memoirs, Living History. His own memoirs are due next autumn and are, he told Publishing News, "one-third written, two-thirds planned". We can expect to hear "a lot about my time in England". The former President is a hoarder who has "kept everything - all the letters from my mother, all the essays I wrote in college". And having read all his predecessors' memoirs, he's taking care to avoid getting bogged down in policy detail. "They're all boring. The only one that's not is Truman's oral history and, before that, Grant's." The latter was written as the general was dying and, Clinton explained, Mark Twain helped him get a decent publishing deal.

Much wringing of hands at the Orion Group. Its star turn Vikram Seth looks set to decamp. Apparently, the author of A Suitable Boy, for which Orion paid £200,000 and was a bestseller, and An Equal Music, for which they paid £500,000 and was not, is asking for £1.5m for his latest project: a family memoir centred on a great uncle who lives in Hendon. The exorbitant asking price puts Seth's agent Giles Gordon in an embarrassing position, as he is married to Maggie McKernan, Seth's publisher. The smart money is on a new home at Fourth Estate: that would reunite Seth with Nick Pearson and Caroline Michel, both of whom were at Orion when A Suitable Boy was bought.