by Edward White (W.W. Norton £22.99, 400 pp) In the world of Alfred Hitchcock, ‘nowhere is safe,’ says Edward White in this masterful study. Factories, schools, bathrooms, windmills, motels and music halls are scenes of graphic murder. There are bombs under the table or on a bus. Garrottings take place in a swanky apartment, next to fresh-cut flowers and antiques. A knife is flung into a diplomat’s back. A woman is pushed from a bell-tower. Janet Leigh was ‘slaughtered while defenceless and naked’ in a shower. People are set alight, suffocated, flung down flights of stairs. Simply put, to Hitchcock, ‘all life is in murder’.