These notes arose from a series of lectures first presented at the Scuola Interna- zionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste in July 1980 and then, in an extended form, at the Universities of Sofia (1980-81) and Bielefeld (1981). Their objective has been two-fold. First, to introduce theorists with some background in group representations to the notion of twistors with an emphasis on their conformal properties; a short guide to the literature on the subject is designed to compensate in part for the imcompleteness and the one-sidedness...