She has, as Richard Eyre wrote of her in a recent issue, "endured grief, danger and loneliness with extraordinary grace and courage, all the while inspiring resistance to the [corrupt Burmese] regime".

A fitting winner, then, and a true hero of this or any other time.

1. Aung San Suu Kyi - Pro-democracy campaigner Nobel Peace Prizewinner, under house arrest in her native Burma .

The confrontation between Aung San Suu Kyi and the brutish military rulers of Burma (officially known as Myanmar ) has the power of myth. At 60, Suu Kyi is still lovely and delicate, like the strings of scented jasmine always looped around her hair. The men in army fatigues and dark glasses who have oppressed her for so long may try to stamp out this flagrantly feminine opponent, but still she rises, unbowed and resolute.

Suu Kyi is the voice of yearning Burmese democrats. Her National League for Democracy party has majority support but is denied power by the military.

She is held under house arrest and NLD members are beaten and killed by the junta's thugs. She could seek refuge abroad, where adulation awaits her, but she chooses to stay, even to death.

Death has, paradoxically, been the making of Suu Kyi; it has stalked and claimed her loved ones and supporters. But each tragedy seems only to tighten her grip on life and her cause. The heady idealism of post-colonial liberation sustains her still. Her father, General Aung San, negotiator of Burma 's independence from the British, was assassinated by political rivals in 1947, when Suu Kyi was only two. One brother drowned when he was eight.

In 1960 her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, became the Burmese ambassador to India. There the young Suu Kyi was inspired by Gandhi's credo of non-violent resistance. Her own ideas were developed at Oxford and later in New York , where she worked at the UN. In 1972, she married Michael Aris, a British scholar of Tibetan culture. They had two sons.

I first met her in 1974 at a dinner, where she gently criticised the North Vietnamese forces for their cruelty to prisoners. We anti-Vietnam war hippies were left feeling oddly soiled. Even then, Suu Kyi's uncompromising principles provoked admiration but irritation, too.

Much later, in March 1988, she returned to Burma to nurse her dying mother, and was hurled into the furnace of political chaos and military tyranny.

That July the dictator General Ne Win resigned. Popular unrest spread and thousands were killed. Suu Kyi formed the NLD. In September, the junta curtailed freedoms and announced an election. Suu Kyi was under house arrest and yet her party won. Since then she has been a de facto captive of the state, sometimes allowed no visitors for months. In 1995, her husband became ill with prostate cancer but was not allowed into Burma.

She has not seen her sons since 1988. To leave would have been to break the promise she made to her people.

They may put Suu Kyi away, but cannot make her go away from the international stage. Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she leads without armies, media manipulation or economic might. Naturally, she has her detractors. The junta brands her a foreign stooge, and now leader of a "terrorist" network. Ziauddin Sardar sees a modernised oriental woman who "triggers all the stereotypes associated with oriental sexuality buried deep in western consciousness". Others have more credible reservations.

Suu Kyi, like Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi before her, is the beneficiary of family privilege and power. If she had taken power in 1990, her appeal may have dulled by now.

Yet she remains in her tower, inviolate. In this increasingly grubby world of expedient and violent politics, the miracle is not that Suu Kyi survives but that she continues to matter so much. Not since Nelson Mandela's long incarceration has a political prisoner drawn so much and such consistent support from millions the world over. [Source]