Audiobooks have allowed me to catch up on the books I always claimed to have read anyway. On long journeys I’ll often be listening to Kafka, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2024
In their sixties
Late enough to be looking back, close enough to still be doing the work. Most of the advice-to-your-younger-self answers here were given by someone in this decade or the next.
42 people · 1,313 answers
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I used to give a fantastic talk about Frankenstein and Dracula, but I’ve never been able to finish either book.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2025
All of them. I’m not someone who can sit down and read – I wish I could.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2024
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, which was one of the set texts for my English literature A-level. I have almost finished it.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2024
How close have you come to death?
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A recurring Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
American playwright, performer, feminist, and activist
Nine years ago I discovered I had stage 3/4 uterine cancer and went through nine months of excruciating surgery, illness and chemotherapy.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2019
My parents died within four days of each other. I was engulfed as I ran from one bedside to another.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2026
American singer
Scarlet fever, 1962. Hypothermia, 1974. Lightning strike, 1986.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2020
British comedian, actor and television presenter
I had a bad heart attack 20 years ago: I think I slid off the mortal coil for about 30 seconds.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2021
British journalist, newsreader, and presenter
Coming under attack while reporting in Iraq.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2024
Before I was DPP, I did a lot of work trying to get rid of the death penalty in various countries, and one was Malawi.
Recorded · The Guardian · 2023
What is the biggest obstacle you have faced professionally?
Originally asked
The American Academy of Achievement, to its honourees, its oral-history interviews
The Academy of Achievement repeatedly asks honorees to identify a major professional obstacle or challenge and describe confronting it.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 2025
I would say there are many challenges, and that's kind of what's hard about it.
Recorded · Nobel Prize Outreach · 2025
Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997-2009; Nobel Peace Prize 2005
No. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out quite that way.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2006
Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965
At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by.
Recorded · Engineering and Science / Caltech Magazine · 1985
Historian and essayist
This cockroach-like existence is cumulatively intolerable even though on any given night it is perfectly manageable.
Recorded · The New York Review of Books · 2010
Essayist, critic and journalist
Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Recorded · Vanity Fair · 2010
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
More than anything else, I had to combat the barriers, and we tore down those barriers.
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2004
Everyone here · A–Z
Adam Clayton, Alison Steadman, Ally McCoist, Andrew Ridgeley, Arlene Phillips, Ben Okri, Bobbi Brown, Bruno Tonioli, Caroline Lucas, Charles Dance, Chris Bryant, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Christopher Hitchens, Clive Myrie, Esther Freud, Gloria Estefan, Jared Harris, John Lewis, John Waters, Jon Sopel, Juliet Stevenson, Kathy Lette, Keir Starmer, Kelly Hoppen, Keren Woodward, Mariella Frostrup, Mario Molina, Mark Radcliffe, Michael Ball, Michael Flatley, Michelle Collins, Midge Ure, Milton Jones, Mohamed ElBaradei, Neil Gaiman, Oliver Sacks, Paul McKenna, Richard Feynman, Sandi Toksvig, Tony Judt, Warren Buffett, Winston Churchill