In this monograph on twistor theory and its applications to harmonic map theory, a central theme is the interplay between the complex homogeneous geometry of flag manifolds and the real homogeneous geometry of symmetric spaces. In particular, flag manifolds are shown to arise as twistor spaces of Riemannian symmetric spaces. Applications of this theory include a complete classification of stable harmonic 2-spheres in Riemannian symmetric spaces and a Backlund transform for harmonic 2-spheres in Lie groups which, in many cases, provides a factorisation theorem for such spheres as well as gap...