By Fiona Capp
Hannah Jewell (click here) clearly had a lot of fun writing this book and it's a lot of fun to read. She takes her title from Donald Trump's remark to Hillary Clinton that she was "such a nasty woman". A nasty woman is, then, one who has managed "to piss off a man for not behaving as she was expected". The women whose stories feature here range from women "with impressive kill counts" such as Artemisia of Caria, the skilled military tactician and only female commander in the Greco-Persian wars, to "women who punched Nazis" such as Irena Sendler, who saved 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. It is gobsmacking what so many of these women achieved in the face of massive resistance. Take 19th-century mathematician Emmy Noether, who was barred from studying at university but went on to formulate what has become known as Noether's theorem and was described by Einstein as a genius.
