Alas, that's the end of foot in mouth disease

The departure of George W Bush from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue raises the spectre of W's memoirs. Laura Bush, the literate member of the family, has already sold her First Lady's story for a "seven-figure sum" to Simon & Schuster. Whatever the former president's appetite for getting his version out on the record, one thing is certain: there will be no more anthologies of Bushisms, a delightful paperback series edited by Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine, who developed a surprising affection for slipshod presidential diction during eight years of malapropisms, such as his nightmare on Wall Street comment of September 2008: "Anyone engaging in illegal financial transactions will be caught and persecuted."