Philippines

The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Known as ‘corpse flower’, the sinister Rafflesia resembles slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat, emits the scent of rotting flesh and eventually subsides into a mass of black slime

How Duterte Harry’s legacy of terror lives on in the Philippines

8 May 2022 5:00 pm

Something momentous is building in the Philippines. Thirty-six years after the kleptocratic despot, Ferdinand Marcos, fled into exile with his…

wars

The wars go on

11 November 2020 7:39 am

America’s longest war has just entered its 20th year. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban…

John Irving spoilt my Christmas

23 January 2016 9:00 am

This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons.   The comments on…

When escape to the sun — or even to Devon — goes horribly wrong

7 November 2015 9:00 am

A character in Sophie Hannah’s A Game for All the Family (Hodder, £14.99, pp. 432) presents a theory: ‘Mysteries are…

Martin Vander Weyer: The Reverend is just a funny sideshow — here's who to blame for the Co-op mess

23 November 2013 9:00 am

The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more…

Portrait of the week

16 November 2013 9:00 am

Home EDF Energy said it would put up prices by 3.9 per cent. BT Sport spent £897 million on the rights…

Joan Collins's notebook: Captain Phillips is great, but Gravity sent me to sleep

16 November 2013 9:00 am

All eyes on the Philippines this week, and rightly so. Godspeed to those American and British ships making their way…

The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti

27 July 2013 9:00 am

There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…