'When the gods were human' is the beginning of an Old Babylonian tale which refers to a mythical period of time before mankind and the gods had to 'do all chores themselves'. It is just one story in a collection that transports the reader to the ancient Near East (what is now modern Syria and Iraq). Anthology of Ancient Mesopotamian Text translates Akkadian and Sumerian literature and captures the imagination, even in those stories where there are gaps as so few copies are preserved completely. The first of the tales is about when the gods were human, The Ancient Near Eastern Tale of the Deluge in which the gods bore hardship day and night for 2,500 years under the king Anu before the other gods revolted. There is a fascinating story called The Babylonian Theodicy which is a 'dialogue about the indifference of the gods' and sees a sufferer tell a friend that 'melancholy and sorrow blacken my face'. The story of the tooth worm is morbidly amusing and narrates the tale of an animal which was created by a quagmire and wished to feast upon human's gums instead of figs, apricots and apples. The book also includes small invocations and prayers to the gods, from a letter in which a person asks why they have been neglected and a lullaby for a baby whose cries disturbed the household god, to the Ishtar hymn of Ammiditana who praises 'mistress of womankind' and describes the goddess as possessing 'seductive appearance, cosmetics and attractiveness'. The stories are translated by a group of authors and are based on academic editions of the tales which are listed in the book's notes. A chronological table at the back of the book also offers readers a rough orientation of ancient Mesopotamia, from the invention of writing in Uruk around 3,200 BC and the supremacy of the Dynasty of Akkade between 2320 and 2170 BC, to the Conquest of Babylon by Cyrus II of Persia and the loss of independence in 539 BC. 122pp.

For more than a millennium, criminals in the British Isles were beheaded, garrotted, hung, drawn and quartered for crimes as varied as serial murder to impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. Certain forms of execution, such as beheading, were reserved for the nobility, and up to the 18th century decapitated heads were displayed publicly on London Bridge. Hanging became the principal method of punishment at about the same time as the beginning of the movement for the abolition of the death penalty. In 1861 the number of capital crimes was reduced to four, and the last judicial executions took place in 1964 with permanent abolition in 1969. A number of high-profile miscarriages of justice contributed to the abolition, among them the trial of serial strangler John Christie in 1953, during which it emerged that a fellow housemate had been executed a few years earlier for a crime of which Christie was now found guilty. Another controversial case was the hanging of 19-year-old Derek Bentley, a mentally challenged young man whose younger accomplice had fired the lethal shot. Starting in 1900, the author lists all the judicial executions in Britain, totalling 865. Most entries are brief, giving the name, age, crime, date of hanging and name of the hangman, but some celebrated cases are described in detail. These include Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, who was executed at Holloway in 1955 by Albert Pierrepoint, a member of a dynasty of chief hangmen. Ruth admitted killing her lover when she found him with another woman and made it clear she felt she deserved to die. By contrast, George Joseph Smith, the "brides in the bath" murderer, cold-bloodedly drowned a series of women for their money. 142pp, paperback, photos.

It is the rule of unforeseen circumstances that says that the best intentions can lead to the worst results, and never was this more succinctly played out than when, in attempting to take the moral high ground, in 1908 Great Britain ended its lucrative trade in opium from Imperial India to China. This immediately ushered in a century of organised criminality in which gangs grew spectacularly wealthy on the illegal narcotics trade, something which Gladstone had accurately predicted when arguing against the abolition of the imperial opium trade in Parliament. The world price of opium soared to a new high and a century of lucrative drug smuggling began. The book introduces the reader to a whole new collection of heroes and villains, including US international drug-buster Harry J. Anslinger, Shanghai underworld master criminal Du Yue-sheng, and tough North-West Frontier police chief Lieutenant Colonel Roos-Keppel, nemesis of Afghan criminal gangs. It was the well-established global trade routes of the Empire which made the gangsters' work easy - in a few short years the Empire upon which the sun never set had become the criminal network with the same attribute. Even the greatest symbols of power - the ships of the Royal Navy - were being used to shift drugs between continents, and soon guns too were being smuggled along the trade routes, by people who had no interest in where they ended up. In another twist of irony, having handed this great gift to organised crime Britain then took on the burden of pursuing the purveyors of the evil it had created, with Scotland Yard providing some of the most innovative drugs-busters, many of whom came to a sticky end when they became too successful for the gangsters' liking. 268pp, photos.

A smuggler was 'a wretch who, in defiance of justice and the laws, imports or exports goods as either contraband or without payment of the customs,' according to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. Smuggling, or 'Free Trade', may have peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries but it first began in response to a toll on wine imports by Anglo-Saxon king Aethelred II (966-1016) who needed to pay for holding off Danish invaders. As a result, wine traders used any port or harbour except the toll ports. The book explains how, over the years, women could help unload and carry smuggled contraband as silk, bladders filled with alcohol and even ropes of tobacco could be wound around the legs and body and safely hidden beneath voluminous layers of skirt and petticoats. The cup of tea may be an established part of life today, but the history highlights that Portuguese merchants in the 1500s would smuggle tea into Europe and the fashion of tea drinking was supposedly introduced to England in the 1600s by Portuguese-born Catherine of Braganza when she married King Charles II in 1662. The chapters are dotted with "little known facts" including the detail that when smugglers were arrested during the 18th century, they received the sympathy of local magistrates reliant on receiving goods and, on one occasion, the magistrate dismissed the charge and ordered the arresting officer to be flogged for his impertinence instead. The facts are often amusing, from the story of a Dorset smuggler who taunted the revenue men by dropping his breeches and mooning them, to Joss Snelling who was still smuggling in his nineties and was presented to Queen Victoria. Photographs of routes which smugglers travelled are also included, a shot of a West Country lane that was typical of a hidden highway, Mermaid Street in Rye and graveyards and old ruins. Paperback, black and white images, 170pp.

Crowns, children and coronations, love, marriage and family, war, murder and peril, royal characters, religion, politics and money, mistresses, bastards and pretenders, the king is dead - long live the king! On 6th January 1066, Harold II became the first English king to be crowned in Westminster Abbey. William the Conqueror was next, crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day of 1066. At his Coronation his soldiers mistook the crowd's shouts of acclamation for the outbreak of a riot and in response set fire to the surrounding buildings. 400 gems of facts in one sentence or two and 2-4 per page accompanied by colour artwork such as portraits, photographs, graphic designs or a silhouette of Queen Victoria or an image of a royal residence or monument like the one to Queen Victoria's beloved Prince Albert in 1859. The 400th snippet is George V exclaiming 'God damn you!' and not as often claimed 'Bugger Bognor!' Did you know that after the Battle of Hastings King Harold's tattoos were used to identify his body or that Elizabeth of York was the model for the queen in the first deck of cards? Or that Henry VIII used a wheelchair and wore glasses? 100 colour illus, a royal paperback, 160pp.

'The Remarkable Story of Personal Names' is the sub-title of this book that covers not just given names to a child but family names or surnames and social titles Mr, Mrs, Miss and Ms and a quick peep at professional or entertainment names like Marilyn. Today parents aim to give their children distinctive names and there are wide variations between societies about when a child is given a name, who has the right to name a child, how the name is chosen, and what name is given. Some governments require parents to choose from a list of approved names and there are tens of thousands of given names, one book listing an incredible 140,000 names from Aabha to Zywona for girls, and from Aaban to Zy-Yon for boys. The book groups traditional names that go back many centuries and ends with new names from new words and takes a look at the influences on name givers and that only a few hundred years ago many names were used for both boys and girls. Other influences on name giving are less obvious, such as how names trickle down from the rich to the poor, and how there are fashions in names. Surnames are handed down from one generation to the next, and in Britain they go back nearly 1,000 years. Tom the blacksmith might be called Tom Smith and if his son Dick was a miller, he might be Dick Miller. Smith still remains the top surname in both the US and Britain, and in Wales, Jones is the unchallenged number one. Other surnames are becoming less common, the most obvious ones the embarrassing ones like Smellie, Daft, Balls and Bottom, names which in the past had different, unexceptional meanings. Migrants from non-English-speaking countries traditionally changed their surnames to help them fit more easily into their new country. There is also the custom of a wife changing her surname to that of a husband. A name gives you a good deal of information about a person and titles refer to a person's occupation, rank or qualification. Alternative spellings for surnames are fascinating, and in all, this is a rich and interesting history about names, identity and identification. 307pp.

Many histories of inns, taverns and the English public house have been written over the past 150 years, but the name the Seven Stars stands out as a special case. Compared to many other images used for pub signs, the depiction of seven stars has a wide range of cultural and literary associations. They appear in religious and astronomical context, in the Bible, have been adopted by the Freemasons. This special book traces the meaning and origins of the sign back 1,500 years to the legal codes of the Anglo-Saxons and beyond that to the mythological astronomy of the ancient Mediterranean region. It is believed that the sign of the Seven Stars originated in the star cluster of the seven Pleiades which was considered to be a bunch of grapes in the sky in a Dionysian and Bacchic world view, and therefore used as a suitable tavern sign. The first half of the book briefly tells the history of public drinking and the oldest and most interesting Seven Stars pubs going back to the 14th century. The first image is of Ye Olde Seven Stars, Withy Grove Manchester in 1908, a half timbered house displaying the sign 'The oldest licensed house in Great Britain licensed over 540 years.' The second part of the book is a discussion of the various meanings that have been proposed, many based on ideas from ancient astronomy. The distribution of the older pubs with the name is closely related to the areas of the Saxon and Mercian law codes that were in operation after the Danish invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. The conclusion is that the symbolism involved retains surviving ideas from the mythological astronomy but were lost in the areas dominated by Scandinavian values where the social and political role of drinking establishments was distinctly different. Featuring rare archive photographs of interiors decorated with clocks and badges and banners, the book delves into religious symbolism and the Immaculate Conception, the Book of Enoch, the Masons, the solar system, the Seven Stars of Taurus, stars and monasteries and how the hexagram or six pointed star was a symbol for beer in parts of Germany in the Middle Ages and still found to the present day. Beautifully illustrated in colour throughout this large format 240 page softback.

Beautiful reprint of the pioneering 1904 colour book Familiar London with Rose Barton's original paintings enlarged and placed in contemporary context with related images from period maps and postcards, newspapers and railway tickets and line art as well as a narrative on London in the early 20th century. There are images of people standing in the Strand waiting for election news about Home Rule for Ireland and Gladstone's advocacy of Irish rights with an image of a crowd of well-dressed Victorians waiting patiently outside the offices of the Daily Graphic. There is the Changing the Guard, Whitehall (little changed), Cromwell Road and the museum district, Villiers Street, Charing Cross where Rudyard Kipling resided at number 43, small self-confident children watching ducks in a London park, tiny children walking hand in hand under Hungerford Bridge, a horse and carriage on a hot afternoon in Piccadilly, sailing boats on the Serpentine, waiting for royalty, and lining the streets of Horse Guards Parade and Hyde Park, the Royal Exchange on Lombard Street, the old River Wall at Chelsea, the dark water and overhanging warehouses beautifully painted in greys and blues and the completely unchanged entrance to the Apothecaries' Garden, now known as Chelsea Physic Garden. We counted 61 exquisite images from gentleman's clubs to flower girls, Nelson's Column in a fog, to hospitals and the Bell Inn, Holborn. Eight maps are reproduced from the 1902 Philips' handy-volume Atlas of London with information on public buildings, railways, tramways and steamboats reproduced across two pages in colour and with postcards alongside and an explanation about the original book and the new world of colour printing when the late Victorians and Edwardians embraced technology and the strides in printing and ink technology. Also maps on endpapers. 26 x 29.2cm, 176pp, colour.

In 1724 'A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates' went on sale in Charles Rivington's shop near St Paul's Cathedral and was an immediate success. By 1726 it had been expanded to a two-volume edition, and in 1734 formed part of an extensive volume that now included the outrageous exploits of highwaymen, street robbers and other scoundrels. The volume includes such famous characters as Edward Teach, Blackbeard, and John Rackam, Calico Jack, who had two female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read disguised among his crew. Some of the other 25 famous outlaws are William Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts, Henry Morgan, Captain Avery, Major Stede Bonnet, Captain Charles Vane, Captain John Rackam, and John Gow. Of the most famous, the Scotsman William Kidd was hanged (twice because the first time the rope snapped) in London in May 1701, and his body then gibbeted at Tilbury Point on the Thames. Henry Avery probably died in poverty in Barnstaple in 1714, his extraordinary ill-gotten wealth having run through his fingers like sand. Blackbeard, the notorious Englishman Edward Teach, was killed in battle with the Royal Navy in November 1718. That year Royal Navy Captain Woodes Rogers defeated an entire colony of pirates in the Bahamas and accepted the surrender of 2000 men. Calico Jack and ten of his crew were hanged in Jamaica in November 1720. An enormous number of other pirates were also captured and executed, estimates ranging from 400-600 between 1716 and 1726. The curse of piracy had been lifted by legal changes and better maritime policing. Blending fact and fiction, many of the details have been verified by historical research and others have endured for centuries to influence the popular image of pirates in literature, film and television. These are tales that cross the Atlantic in both directions, to the new worlds of the west and the coasts of Africa. 396pp, lovely woodcut illus.

The oldest laws were created in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. In the 3rd millennium BCE, the King of Ur ordered his scribes to write out a code of laws on a clay tablet. Several centuries later, warlike leaders in central China inscribed ideograms onto bamboo strips and bronze vessels, which set out long lists of crimes and punishments. Meanwhile Indian scholars were crafting ritual texts based on the ancient wisdom of the Vedas. In the meantime legal techniques travelled, inspiring kings and rulers with quite different ambitions and were also taken up in much more local contexts by princes, counsels, villages and tribesmen. Hindu, Jewish, Islamic and Christian scholars all made detailed and extensive laws as they developed their traditions. The epic story of how humans have used laws to forge civilisations looks at the rise and fall of sophisticated legal systems underpinning ancient empires and also shows how common people - tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers - have called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, categorise households, levy taxes, raise armies, regulate social behaviour, resolve disputes and resist outsiders. But people have also quoted laws to challenge government decisions, resist abuses of power and seek justice. The US Constitution soon acquired a mythic aura as a symbol of the union's ideals and aspirations. Although legal principals originating in Western Europe now seem to dominate the globe, a more complicated legal reality persists everywhere from the influence of Islamic law across the Middle East to the persistence of traditional codes among nomadic Tibetan yak herders, to the unwritten rules of gangs worldwide. A monumental history subtitled 'A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the World'. 570pp from the Oxford University Professor Fernanda Pirie, 16 pages of colour photos.