The question
Who alive today do you admire most, and what draws you to them?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's Q&A repeatedly uses this prompt, sometimes dropping 'living' while retaining the same comparative judgment.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 October 2021 source ↗
It's a fool's errand to waste time admiring anybody.
People inspiring the new generation of politically active youngsters.
My father. He has treated every person he has met with kindness and respect.
Angela Merkel; she seems wise, compassionate, curiously huggable.
Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.
I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.
When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.
When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.
I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.
That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.
Esther Rantzen, Timothy Hutton, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Goldfrapp, Dermot O'Leary, Mel Brooks
Search the directory for somebody in particular.