Who else, but Anne Robinson, presenter of The Weakest Link and the proud owner of a rapier tongue capable of cutting contestants in two.

Dressed from head to toe in black, her eyes boring into her contestants over half-moon glasses, Anne Robinson became famous in Britain through The Weakest Link, a quiz show and vehicle for her catty commentaries. When NBC decided to try it out on American audiences, they wanted Robinson to host it because "she is the show" (It would have taken a brave corporation not to).

Part schoolmistress, part harridan, and all dominatrix, Robinson flits from London to Los Angeles, reducing grown men to quivering jellies on both sides of the Atlantic with her catchphrase, "You are the weakest link, goodbye," for millions of pounds a year.

But it wasn't always so for Robinson. Memoirs of an Unfit Mother tells the story of her turbulent childhood in Liverpool, her days as a Fleet Street hack reporter, her struggle with alcoholism and, most importantly, her custody battle for her only child.

Its pages reveal that she is every inch the hard-nosed, quick-witted, often arrogant redhead we have come to know and fear.

Best-seller lists are crammed with celebrity autobiographies, and Robinson's life, like most of the others, is a sad and pathetic story of self-abuse with a happy ending. But it is the telling that sets it apart; Robinson reveals a real gift for bringing characters to life.

She provides a touching account of her relationship with her mother and then, in turn, with her own daughter. The bullying technique she has perfected as host of The Weakest Link is reminiscent of that used by her mother, whom she both feared and idolised until the day she died.

Of Irish Catholic descent, Anne Wilson came from a long line of formidable women "part monster, part magic", who worked hard to ensure her family had nothing but the best in food, clothing and education. As a market-stall owner in Liverpool after World War II, when Britain was in a severe depression, she made sure her family wanted for nothing.

Her motto -- "up by six and out at five" -- meant she could meet the deliveries of rabbit rations for Liverpool first thing in the morning, and sell them on the black market for enormous profit later that day.

Money was a passport to a better world. She firmly believed her children were superior to anyone else's, and insisted they attended private Catholic fee-paying schools. Robinson's brother had no choice but to retake his final exams to ensure a place at an Oxbridge college. Despite coming from an ostensibly working class background, the family lived in a wealthy suburb of Liverpool, holidayed in Cannes and shopped for expensive designer clothes on Bond Street.

When young Anne began her work as a Daily Mail reporter, her mother bought her an MG and a fur coat, in which she gladly swanned about London taking notes on the day's news. But for all her mother's ambition for herself and her precious offspring -- her poor schoolteacher husband was considered "an ongoing trial and disappointment" -- Mrs Robinson became an inveterate alcoholic.

Anne Robinson remembers watching her mother dealing with traders early in the morning, swaying and stinking of drink already on the outside of a bottle of whisky, and swearing that she would never touch a drop.

And, true enough, when she started out as a young reporter, her tipple was no stronger than pineapple juice. One of the most colourful sections of the book is her description of Fleet Street in the 1960s and 1970s, a place where women were usually hired as secretaries only. She describes how her first boss at the Times would continually invite his secretaries into his office to take dictation while taking the opportunity to paw them.

"It was the same prevailing wind," she writes in her customary acerbic style, "that meant a woman couldn't hire a television set without a man's signature. It mattered not that she might be on the first ladder of a career and the man was some no-hoper poet without a pot to piss in."

But Robinson had been brought up by a mother who tolerated men, while believing herself superior. It was this belief that being a woman in a man's world was not a disadvantage which ensured the young Robinson's success. To this day, she has a clear view of her own worth, and frequently mentions how talented she was.

It is unsurprisingly, then, that she felt it was severely unjust when she was fired from the Daily Mail following her marriage to her boss, Charlie Wilson. She ignored her husband's requests for her to stay at home and prepare for the arrival of their baby, and instead got a job with the Sunday Times.

Robinson does not make clear how she progressed in a few short years from drinking only pineapple juice to carrying a bottle of alcohol around in her handbag.

Her first drunken experience was during a trip to Paris with some other journalists, for whom drinking phenomenal amounts on a daily basis was practically part of the job description.

Robinson's predilection for alcohol escalated during her first disastrous marriage to Wilson and the birth of her daughter Emma. She describes the fights with her husband, who was also not averse to a drop himself. "I helped take away the pain by drinking," she says.

The fulcrum of the book is the custody battle fought over Emma. In 1970s Britain, the idea that a father would be granted custody of a baby daughter was unheard of. But as a stream of witnesses, including her now husband, testified against her, Robinson lost her daughter, not to alcoholism, but simply to ambition. Her remark some years before, "I would rather cover the Vietnam War than hoover the sitting room," was provided as evidence of a wayward and inattentive wife and mother.

After the divorce, her drinking reached extreme lows. She describes waking up in a stranger's bed, her knickers around her neck, surrounded by vomit.

But just as she does not explain properly how the drinking started, neither does she tell how it finally ended in 1978. The implication is that she pulled herself around for her daughter. She explains how she remembers the tears in Emma's eyes when they stopped at a petrol station to pick up a bottle of booze which she proceeded to down. And that was it.

Robinson went on to become a widely read columnist in the Daily Mirror. Even then, the vitriol she would regularly pour on others via her alter ego, the Wednesday Witch, was her selling point. She quotes from a particularly catty piece ripping Joan Collins to shreds and from Collins's reply, which was printed under the heading "The Bitch Bites Back".

Among her many ambitions, motherhood has always ranked near the top. Her inability to have more children with her second husband, John Penrose, was a constant source of upset.

Today, she spends as much time as possible with her daughter, now a film producer in New York. In fact, you have to wonder if she doesn't make a nuisance of herself, constantly turning up on her daughter's film sets.

But her relationship with her only daughter is now undeniably close, perhaps her ultimate revenge for once being forced to give her up; the final proof that the 'Queen of Mean' is not an "unfit mother".