Incapacitation.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What happens when we die?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Zadie Smith
Novelist and essayist
Violent death. Death generally.
Shakin' Stevens
Welsh rock and roll singer and songwriter
A world without music.
To lose the ability to do my work.
More from Mark Radcliffe
View profile →A sense of what’s right, a few quid and some nice paintings.
Having three great daughters, having been on the radio for nearly 50 years and not being dead.
Working in a bottle factory, which lasted one day, and the Radio 1 breakfast show.
This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
Throat and neck cancer in 2018. They told me six to eight months if it hadn’t been caught.
A nice long rest.
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Also answered this
Helen George, Gayle King, Keith McNally, Robert Glenister, Kevin Rowland, Olivia de Havilland
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