Alfred Hitchcock

Peter Ackroyd’s short biography Alfred Hitchcock skips over many of the specific details of Hitchcock’s film career and instead focuses on his childhood traumas, madeleine-like moments, and early years in London to better appreciate how his artistic tastes were formed. Ackroyd is a bit too much of an armchair psychiatrist in his conclusions (he finds Hitch to be “a shuddering, shivering human being, afraid of judgment and punishment”), but more biographies should approach their subjects in such a unique way.