Sandi Toksvig's top 10 heroines from history

1. Murasaki Shikibu (c973 or 978 – c1014 or 1031)The trouble with a lot of women in history is that we just don’t know that much about them. I would love to have met Murasaki Shikibu but she would have been tricky to find as this was not even her real name. She was born in Japan at a time when women were neither educated to write nor were their names recorded for posterity. In English she is refer