Martin Hemming

India is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t been there. It’s so many kinds of opposites. Everywhere you travel in India, you find completely different

Why?Puffins! The cliff-edged island of Skomer, off the Marloes Peninsula, Pembrokeshire, was a farm until the Second World War. It’s now a Welsh Wildlife Trust reserve that’s the sometime home of 25,000 of everyone’s favourite auk — even the RSPB describes puffins as “comical”. They’re due in any

Why?Puffins! The cliff-edged island of Skomer, off the Marloes Peninsula, Pembrokeshire, was a farm until the Second World War. It’s now a Welsh Wildlife Trust reserve that’s the sometime home of 25,000 of everyone’s favourite auk — even the RSPB describes puffins as “comical”. They’re due in any

If you can recall the former Manchester City midfielder Stephen Ireland at all, it will be for one reason: the time, in 2007, he got out of playing a match for Ireland by lying that his grandmother had died.The Brazilian footballer Carlos Henrique Raposo killed off at least four grandmothers — and d

It was difficult to argue about bedtime if you were growing up in Mike Berners-Lee’s house. There was a formula for it: t = 6 + y/4, where t was the time you should be tucked up under the covers and y was your age in years. There was another formula for pocket money. Slices of dessert were measured

When he was 19, our writer loved the country of squat loos, rip-off taxis and seedy auberges. Would a return visit give his children playground bragging rights?

OK, so it’s just outside the city — but the Tawny hotel’s latest cool, contemporary self-catering cottage is the luxury rural foil to Staffordshire’s industrial image

My father is a pilot and my grandad was a fighter pilot during the war, so I grew up with flying. I learnt to fly aeroplanes in 2003, then helicopters in 2012.

It’s summer — so it’s time to start boasting about cooking outside on an open fire. Here’s how to spot a barbecue bore. Plus: the best picnic kit this summer

Mummified crocodiles, sand dune sledging, £1 noodles and an overnight train journey from Cairo to Aswan made this holiday unforgettable