IF life was a list of boxes, Sandi Toksvig would have ticked lots of them.

Comedienne, stand-up comic, broadcaster, quiz show host, writer, traveller, round-Britain sailor and book-prize judge – Sandi has done them all.

Last Christmas, she did panto for the first time. “That was fab, I really enjoyed it,” she says, “but it’s very tiring. I’m glad I did it, I’ve ticked that box.”

She will be in Salisbury on Friday, November 28 to talk about her latest children’s book, Girls Are Best, at the Godolphin School.

“It was a very nice invitation, I thought it sounded rather jolly and that’s all it takes,” she says.

Girls Are Best focuses on feisty females such as Cleopatra and Boudicca and their Amazonian achievements in a male-dominated world.

There’s Mary Anderson, who invented the car windscreen wiper, Phyllis Pearsall who thought of A-Z maps and Ruth Wakefield, who made the world a better place by baking the first chocolate chip cookie.

There are scientists, explorers, world leaders and alpha girls galore.

So how competitive and keen to succeed is Sandi?

“Not very, but I get very anxious about the parlous state of the world – we need every brain working on these problems. “So I am very keen to say to girls you can be and do anything because somebody did it before you.

“Hopefully the book is light hearted but I have some serious points that I want to make.”

She will also be talking about Hitler’s Canary, her children’s novel based on her Danish family’s history.

Her father was a youngster in Copenhagen when Germany invaded and he and his parents became part of the underground, which spirited the Danish Jewish population away to neutral Sweden “I used to ask my father about it and he said it was the right thing to do,” she says.

She wrote the book as an adventure story for her son, then 12.

“I wrote about his grandfather at the same age as him.

“The real question is not would you stand up for a stranger, but would you risk your child’s life to save someone you don’t know?

“Would I allow my son to run messages across enemy lines to save somebody I’ve never met?

“I genuinely don’t know – I hope so.”

Sandi has been quoted as saying that there isn’t a pigeon with a hole big enough to put her in.

“I don’t pigeonhole myself – I just take jobs that I find interesting.

“I worry about these young people who appear on television and say this is my dream and I’ll die if it doesn’t happen.

“I always think if that doesn’t happen, something else will.”