Books: Cover Stories

AS POSH Spice celebrates the joys of motherhood, ex-colleague Ginger is enjoying being even richer than she was last week. For Transworld have paid in excess of pounds 500,000 for her memoirs, and If Only will be released this autumn. As revealed exclusively here last week, agent Mark Lucas hand-picked several publishers to participate in a beauty contest. What clinched it for Transworld was the fact that they publish The Celestine Prophecy. "Geri's very into new-agey things," explained Patrick Janson- Smith, deputy MD. Publishers were invited to Halliwell's Hertfordshire home and all found her "charming".

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ON HER outing at Harrods, Monica Lewinsky took fright at the sheer number of snappers. What wasn't widely reported was the surreal chase, through china, garden furniture and cookware, as Monica and her security detail fled with journos in hot pursuit. Even the music was surreally appropriate: in one department, Frank Sinatra crooned "I've been a rover", presumably in honour of Bill; in another, Linda Ronstadt pleaded "Rescue me".

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OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS yet again for embattled Beryl Bainbridge. This week brought news that she is shortlisted for the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize. She will find that some of her competitors speak with funny accents.

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AT THE height of Margaret Thatcher's crackdown on leaky civil servants and memoir-writing ex-intelligence men, Morris Riley's manuscript on Kim Philby and his friends was rubbished by George Kennedy Young, a former deputy director of MI6. It seems that Riley, a Sheffield accountant, named powerful individuals with personal links to Philby. Young accused Riley of "smearing" British intelligence but, in the late 1980s, a certain Peter Wright corroborated his findings. Philby: The Hidden Years will finally be published next month by Janus - aptly, for a book about traitors.

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HEADLINE HAVE signed up what they believe is the millennial novel. Turn of the Century by Kurt Anderson of Spy magazine (New York's Private Eye) is described, inevitably, as the Bonfire of the Vanities for the coming decade. The publisher paid well into six figures at a keen auction.