Richard Quest

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Richard Austin Quest (born March 9, 1962 in Liverpool) is a British news anchor based in London on the Cable News Network edition CNN International.

Quest studied Law at the University of Leeds, taking his degree in 1985, and was called to the Bar. He had already gained broadcast experience when he spent the 1983-84 academic year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. As news director for campus radio station WRVU, he built from scratch a reporting staff that presented an ambitious range of news programming.

Quest started as a Trainee Journalist at the BBC in 1985, joined their financial section in 1987, then moved to New York in 1989 to become their North America business correspondent.

Quest later worked for the BBC (reporting from the USA) as part of their then fledgling BBC News 24 channel. He was their business correspondent reporting on, and discussing the world stock market in a regular segment entitled 'World Business Report' usually aired between 2:00 and 3:00am (GMT).

Quest joined CNN in 2001 for the launch of "Business International". Since this time Quest has covered a variety of different events for CNN, amongst others an analysis of the U.S. elections as 'American Quest' and the start of the circulation of Euro banknotes and coins on Jan 1, 2002. He has also headed up CNN's coverage of several events involving the British royal family.

In addition to anchoring "Business International" from London, Quest hosts two monthly programs on CNN International called "Business Traveller" and "Quest". Quest formerly anchored the show "CNN Today" which is geared towards morning audiences in Europe. Max Foster took his place on "CNN Today."

Richard has a twin sister, Caroline. Caroline Quest is Managing Director of Innovation and Enterprise, Queen Mary University of London.

In 2003, Quest was a passenger on the final transatlantic Concorde flight.

[edit] Trivia

Quest was incorrectly reported to have turned down a job offer from the English-language 'Al Jazeera' channel, on the basis that being Jewish he might not be suitable. But there was never any job offer - the story came about after Quest had joked to friends that his religion would have stopped him getting a job with the company.[1]
In one of his CNN programs investigating human genius, Quest interviewed James Watson, Gary Kasparov, Tony Buzan and Kim Peek. A highly intelligent man himself, he took an IQ test for Mensa and failed dismally with less than average 96 points (the program did not explain if the test was real, or was it one of Quest's famous jokes about himself).
In other programs, Quest poked fun at his "talents" by recording a pop song, walking a catwalk, dacing the 'cha-cha' for the first time in his life, in front of an audience of 10,000 and sprinting 100 meters