This is a short introductory guide to the specific criminal offences, including parties to crime and general defences. The approach taken by the author is to begin with a discussion of one offence - murder - and then to illustrate the general principles of criminal liability by referring to that offence. This approach is designed to help students understand how the general prinicples are to be applied to individual crimes.;This edition revises and updates all the material to reflect relevant changes in the law, covering, for example, the Criminal Justice Act 1993, the Road Traffic Act 1991, with regard to reckless driving, and the two major House of Lords decisions in Gomez and Brown.