Ferran Adri started out washing dishes and went on to become the most celebrated chef in the world. The organised anarchy of his cooking led the way as a band of Spanish chefs came to dominate 21st century haute cuisine. El Bulli, Adri's ...

In 1941, Marcial Maciel founded the Legion of Christ, one of the Roman Catholic Church's most conservative orders. Born out of the anticlerical feeling of 30s and 40s Mexico, Fr. Maciel sought to mix the elitism of Opus Dei with the passionate ...

The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP), has set itself the enormous task of collecting the seeds of all the world's wild plants and preserving them for the future. The organisers are particularly concerned about the estimated 60 000 to 100 000 ...

After the first anniversaries of major uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen have come and gone and a violent, deadly summer threatens to engulf Syria in all out civil war, the Arab Spring seems to have lost none of its intensity and looks set...

Until January 2012, Mali was considered one of the most stable countries in Africa, with a succession of democratically elected presidents who ruled the country of 14.5 million since democracy was established in 1991. A growing rebellion by Tuaregs ...

Sport is one of our greatest means of expression, offering its participants and spectators a means to escape reality, proclaim their identity and demonstrate great feats of strength, endurance and skill. At its best, it allows people the world over to ...

All wars leave their traces, and not only in the form of cemeteries where lines of the fallen lie in their thousands. Each war generates its own defence system. New weapons are invented that lead to new strategies and new fear. Once peace has been ...

Following the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2005, Martin Roemers produced a series of photographs of veterans from the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and Germany. The pictures are accompanied by short ...

Fifty years ago, the very first Trabant rolled off the production line at the Sachsenring Automobile Works in Zwickau. The compact car with a plastic body would become a potent and enduring symbol of the German Democratic Republic, as over three million ...

150 years ago, Bernadette Soubirous had a vision which would change her life. The 14 year old was gathering firewood from a grotto outside the town of Lourdes, a rural backwater in southern France, when she first saw what she termed 'a small young lady' ...

In 2015 it will be 65 years since the end of World War II in Europe. After the war was over, many thousands of people would never see again. Martin Roemers photographed and interviewed some of those who lost their sight as a result of the conflict. He ...

Half of humanity now lives in a city, and the United Nations has predicted that 70 per cent of the world's population will reside in urban areas by 2050. Across the developing world, cities gain an average of five million residents every month.India ...

When popular uprisings began across north Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, Yemen's autocratic president Ali Abdullah Saleh was already facing an armed rebellion in the north and separatist protests in the south. Yemen is widely considered to...

The Grand Trunk Road is the oldest, longest, and most famous highway in southern Asia. For millennia the Grand Trunk Road was used by invaders to conquer the subcontinent. After the British arrived in the 17th century, they used it as the main artery...

May 2014 marks the 10th anniversary of Poland joining the European Union. During the past decade Poles have established themselves as the largest group of economic migrants ever to arrive in Britain. Over half a million people use Polish as their ...

In July 2014 Yorkshire will host Le Grand Depart, the first two stages of the world's greatest cycle race, the Tour de France. The riders will travel through spectacular countryside as well as much of the region's former industrial heartland. Many of...