Cover Stories: Future of the Booker; Bookish Bush; Potter-love

Peter Carey may have gone away happy with this year's Booker prize cheque, but who will be signing it in future? Iceland, now Booker's owner, has signalled that it wants to give up sponsorship within two years. Will glitz-hungry firms queue up to take over? Two problems: first, all corporate shindigs are coming under the eye of accountants fearful of recession (and the award costs over £300,000). Second, the name, with its great brand recognition, would have to stay. What price "the Booker prize sponsored by [say] Shell"?

The bookish tendencies of the first lady, Laura Bush (she was a librarian), appear to be rubbing off on her husband. Between rallying his fellow Americans, George Bush is spending time escaping into fiction. He has revealed a penchant for his fellow Texan Kinky Friedman, the country singer turned crime novelist. The two got along just fine at the Texas Book Festival. Dubya is also collaborating on a book: he and his father are working with Mickey Herskowitz (another Texan) on an exposition of Bush family ethics. Cynics suggest it will be a mere pamphlet.

Having passed on the opportunity to direct the first Harry Potter film, which opens in November, Steven Spielberg has now let it be known he considers the third of J K Rowling's books, The Prisoner of Azkaban, to be a work of "pure genius... much darker, more esoteric and interesting to me personally. If they'd offered me that, I'd have said yes."