16 NOVEMBER 2002, page 48

Philip Hensher

The fiction I enjoyed most this year was Claire Messud's masterly The Hunters (Picador, £12.99), an astonishing display of technical virtuosity and revealed feeling, and A. L.......

D. J . Taylor

Three biographies I particularly enjoyed were Ann Thwaite's subtly wrought Glimpses of the Wonderful: Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1878 (Faber, £25), Hilary Spurling's partial but......

Bevis Hillier

A book which didn't get many reviews, perhaps because it was spin-off from a television series, was John Sutherland's Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation's......