Sara Cox
English broadcaster
My half-electric Volvo.
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What inspires you to learn?
Attention & the world
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this standing prompt, with minor contractions and word-order variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Buying art…. But it makes me happy!
Vanity Fair, Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 6 December 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
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Joan Jett
American singer, songwriter and guitarist
My electric car: it’s a hybrid Cadillac.
Paul Heaton
British musician
My first car, three years ago – a Toyota Verso.
Robbie Williams
English singer
A ring for my wife.
More from John Lewis
View profile →When I was growing up I wanted to be a minister. I wanted to preach.
On the Freedom Rides in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a state trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die.
I never thought that we would fail or that I would fail. I knew from time to time we may make some blunders. We may make some mistakes, but we were not going to fail.
Barack Obama, because he believed he could be president of the United States, and he succeeded. He was kind, and he tried to set a high standard of leadership.
When I was growing up on a farm in rural Alabama, I fell in love with raising chickens. They seem truly innocent. Whenever I'm around chickens, I feel happy.
I wanted to know. I asked a lot of questions and she would say, "Read, read."…So she inspired me a great deal.
Recorded
Julian Bond, Explorations in Black Leadership interview, Explorations in Black Leadership, University of Virginia
source ↗
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Jon Snow, Gloria Steinem, Jeremy Vine, Robert Peston, Emma Barnett, Anita Rani
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