People who can’t wait to argue.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Money & investment
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A verbatim standing question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A questionnaire, documented across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I find it really interesting the way people are drawn to power, usually male power, sometimes in its dark mode. I wonder what they get from it. My experience of bastards is that there is very little material benefit gained from being in their company, though you feel there might be, any minute. Or you get something for a while and then the polarity switches. It’s a huge con. Trump made the mechanism clear – in this, I think he is a timely figure.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 September 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 197 →Laziness, lack of empathy, lack of humour.
Fay Ripley
English actress, television presenter, cookbook author
Being judgmental – how dare they!
I don’t like false or opportunistic people.
More from Anne Enright
View profile →When I was seven I wanted to be a nun. When I was eight, I wanted to be a boy so that I could be anything I wanted. Also, of course, I wanted to be Samantha in Bewitched.
A few weeks ago, we spent a long weekend going around West Cork, and I was so happy it amazed me. My husband doesn’t always make me happy around the house, but add a road and some scenery and the combination can be very powerful.
Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Catherine Corless, who spent her own money to secure birth certificates for the unrecorded dead children of the Tuam mother and baby home.
I was not great with my mother-in-law, who was a very gentle woman. I thought she would be an uninvited part of my life for ever, but she died early and I wished I had been more open and patient.
When Kellie Harrington won gold for Ireland in the boxing at the Paris Olympics I pumped out the briny.
More on values & belief
- Which living person do you most admire, and why? 406 answers
- What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong? 79 answers
- What are you unwilling to optimise? 30 answers
- What have you come to understand about what it means to be human? 14 answers
- What is the most overrated virtue? 10 answers
- What do you need to believe in order to get through the day? 9 answers
Also answered this
Kazuo Ishiguro, Maggie O'Farrell, Adam Kay, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Whitehall, Fay Ripley
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All values & belief questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject