Bandits, by Eric Hobsbawm (Abacus, £9.99 in UK)

Hobsbawn, otherwise a slightly austere historian-thinker, has two rather unexpected interests outside his own field(s): jazz (he once wrote a column for the New Statesman on the subject) and banditry. He does not claim to give a history of all the illustrious robber-chiefs down the centuries, which would obviously need several volumes and would prove repetitive: instead he discusses the mythology of the Robin Hood-style "noble robber" - those obsessed with revenge (the Irish rapparees might serve here), the dispossessed, and the many, particularly in Eastern Europe and Asia, who took up banditry purely as a profession. The Sicilian Salvatore Giuliano is given star treatment and so is the Catalan Sabate, a violent anarchist who raided into Francoist Spain from France for many years before he was killed.