ATLANTA - Former President Jimmy Carter often sent his mother to meet with foreign dignitaries and attend state funerals, but it wasn't until he started researching a new book about her life that he learned just what the woman known as "Miss Lillian" did on those visits.

"Mama had developed a reputation for expressing unorthodox opinions and not being constrained by any outside advice," Carter writes in "A Remarkable Mother," which chronicles Lillian's life from her birth in 1898 to her death from cancer in 1983. "The officials in the State Department were always quite nervous about what she would do or say that might violate protocol and damage relations between our government and that of the country she was visiting."

The book is constructed from diaries, letters and interviews with family and friends.

"It was a lot of fun for me to write," Carter said in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I learned a lot I hadn't known before."

One such tidbit? His mother, on visiting Rome, brushed aside prepared remarks and told the media she was happy to be there for three reasons, among them that she had "never met an ugly Italian."

Her blunt and unorthodox ways often embarrassed her peanut farmer-turned-politician son, who spent many White House press conferences answering questions about comments his mother had made the previous day.

The president is in trouble, and the president says that it is the president's fault. Not his own fault, but the fault of the previous president, Jacques Chirac, and the president before that and the president before that ...

Nicolas Sarkozy, who celebrates one year in office next Friday, is now the least popular president in the half century of the French Fifth Republic. In a combative, and some said arrogant, pep talk to his centre-right parliamentarians last week, President Sarkozy blamed everyone but himself.

It was the fault of his former mentor, President Chirac, who had given up trying to reform France after six months. It was the fault of the French people, who detested change. It was the fault of the French press, which had turned itself into a rabid "opposition" because the nominal, Socialist-led opposition was so "useless".

President Sarkozy even took side-swipes at the late President François Mitterrand and his own political hero, Charles de Gaulle. "It was a political strategy seminar of incredible arrogance," said one deputy from Sarkozy's party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).

Two weeks ago, President Sarkozy seemed to have decided that, to make something of his four remaining years in office, he must take a humbler approach. In a prime-time television interview, he admitted that he had made "mistakes", but promised to push ahead with his plans to make the French state smaller and to encourage France to work harder. This kinder, gentler Sarko does not appear to have lasted for very long, though.

John Prescott says he urged Tony Blair to sack Gordon Brown at the height of their frequent rows - but the former prime minister was "scared" of his chancellor.

He says he also urged Brown to resign and fight Blair from the back benches, but Brown, then chancellor, shrank from such a bold gamble.

Prescott, who as deputy prime minister for 10 years knew more than anyone about the furious resentment between the two men, reveals the true depth of their tempestuous relationship in his memoirs which are serialised exclusively today in The Sunday Times.

He also discloses that he intended to resign after his affair with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary, was made public, but he was persuaded not to by his wife Pauline. She speaks publicly for the first time about the affair in today's News Review, saying that "a lot of very bitter women" wrote to her: "What they suggested I should do to John just doesn't bear repeating."

The Times interview with Cherie Blair | Speaking for Myself: book extract (part 1) | Book extract (part 2)

Cherie Blair was astonished by the ruthless manner in which her husband made public within hours the fact that she had lost the baby she was carrying.

In her autobiography, serialised in The Times today, she reveals that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, insisted on informing the media almost immediately in 2002.

In an emotional account of losing her baby at the age of 47, she writes of her disbelief that her husband and Mr Campbell telephoned to discuss the announcement as she lay in pain and still bleeding. They did so in order that a delay in their holiday did not trigger false speculation of an early invasion of Iraq.

The former Prime Minister's wife also reveals that she and her husband conceived their fourth child, Leo, while guests of the Queen at Balmoral. It happened because she had not packed her contraceptive equipment and because of the bitter cold, Mrs Blair says.