The French director François Truffaut, who conducted a famous series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962, said afterward that he had found him to be a “neurotic” and “fearful” and “deeply vulnerable” man, but this was precisely what had made him an “artist of anxiety.”

Hitchcock kept both the anxiety and the artist hidden. He developed a public persona that went well with his ample form and uniform dark suits—a phlegmatic, understated manner; a droll, deadpan wit. He spoke in carefully enunciated words delivered in a low monotone, like a high priest or a funeral director. But beneath the imperturbable surface was a man as jittery as a cat, or a Kafka—another artist of anxiety whose recurrent theme was an innocent man accused of some enigmatic crime. As Peter Ackroyd remarks at the beginning of this brisk, discerning critical biography: