Searching through the bookshop at an arts cinema can be lowering; film buffery can suck the life out of any movie. When Alfred Hitchcock was interviewed by François Truffaut and asked about the deeper meaning of his films, Hitchcock deflected his questions. His only aim, he said, was “to make the spectator suffer”. Peter Ackroyd’s biography does Hitchcock the service of not giving us a film studies surmise about what his films were trying to tell us. Instead, he’s written a buoyant, vivid, wittily told and wonderfully engaging history of the man and his movies, leaving us to decide if this fearful, abusive, obsessive man employed any of his numerous kinks of character in the creation of his work.What comes through most powerfully is Hitchcock the artist, who