Paul Kingsnorth. Beast. Faber & Faber, 2016.
I'm not sure he's quite meeting his own standard as yet, but I'm so sympathetic to the basic ambition that I look forward to his trying again.
Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.