Indonesia
The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest
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
The man who loves volcanoes
Clive Oppenheimer feels a deep kinship with the many volcanoes he has studied. When he is airlifted from Mount Erebus, he suffers ‘the heartache of leaving a lover’
Indonesia’s mandatory hijab ban is a triumph for women
Last week, Indonesia banned schools across the country from forcing girls to wear the hijab, after the parents of a…
Biden should embrace Britain’s new Indo-Pacific strategy
While final negotiations on the UK’s relationship with the EU continue to drag, No. 10 is moving rapidly to expand…
A remote island tribe in Indonesia makes whaling seem positively noble
Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of the Book of…
David Attenborough used to steal the animals he found in the jungle and take them home
Let me start this week with an admittedly hard quiz question: in 1954, how did the sudden illness of Jack…
Harriet Harman’s diary: the joys of being a ‘former’
One of my constituents has been in an Indonesian prison since May. Journalist Rebecca Prosser was arrested with her colleague…
Stunning, riveting, horrifying: Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look of Silence reviewed
With Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing you’d be minded to think that’s it, that’s the Indonesian genocide (1965–66) done,…
Portrait of the week
Home The British economy grew by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, the slowest quarterly growth for…