Books: Cover Stories

IT NOW seems that Princess Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell, is not yet at work on a biography. Instead, he has been writing a book on butlering. Entertaining With Style, which Deutsch will publish in the autumn, offers scaled-down versions of ideas he presented at Kensington Palace soirees. It will include the odd Di anecdote, but his discretion is emphasised. His agent does not rule out a future memoir of some kind, but Burrell has so far behaved like a perfect gentleman.

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WHICH IS more than can be said for James Hewitt, whose memoir Princess in Love - ghosted by Anna Pasternak - so dismayed his former lover. Hewitt is now having a go at a second instalment of memoirs, working on his own. The writing is said to be weak, but the manuscript a page-turner. In an effort to keep it under wraps, the project is being handled from the States. A British deal has yet to be agreed but rumour has it that the Daily Telegraph, which likes to think of itself as a paper for gentlemen, has paid a million for serial rights.

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THROUGH THE Balkan crisis, commentators have noted that part of the problem is that today's world leaders have no sense of history. Now journalist Simon Winchester is at work on a book that should put everyone right. In The Fracture Zone, he will set the conflict in context, looking at the rise and fall of the old Ottoman and Hapsburg empires. He is talking to diplomats and soldiers, as well as to some of those displaced from their homelands. Winchester will deliver next month, for immediate publication by Viking.

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MEANWHILE, SOPHIE Grigson has got together with a group of celebrity chefs, including Antony Worrall Thompson, Antonio Carluccio, Nigel Slater and Saint Delia, to compile Cooks for Kosovo. Each is contributing a recipe to the book, which will be on sale next month at pounds 5.99, with pounds 1 from each copy sold going to the Kosovo Crisis Appeal.