Hitchcock's career to date falls neatly into four phases: the silent period (nine films); the 1930s in Britain (fourteen films); the 1940s in America and Britain (thirteen features and two shorts); and the period since then, beginning with Strangers on a Train (twelve films). To indulge in drastic oversimplification, these phases represent respectively: apprenticeship; the perfection of a style; appreciation of the limitations of that style and an erratic quest for a new style; and final maturity. (p. 171)

Even for The Lodger allowances have to be made; to enjoy it fully requires an exercise of deliberate 'thinking-back', to see it in the context of the British cinema of the time…. In itself the film is clearly something of a declaration of independence: deliberately showy in style, it leaves no one in any doubt that its maker is a director to reckon with, even to the extent of being...