The 52 steps - Telegraph Visitors to Britain this summer will not just be coming for the sport, thrilling though the Olympic and Paralympic Games promise to be. The country's cultural menu, never less than enthralling, is more impressive than ever this year in response to the Games. The World Shakespeare Festival and next weekend's BT River of Music are just two examples of the world's finest actors and musicians descending on the capital; meanwhile, at the British Film Institute, a very British figure is being celebrated, the greatest film director these islands have produced. Alfred Hitchcock's directing career spanned an incredible 50 years between 1925, the peak of the silent era, and 1976, when Scorsese and Coppola were in their prime. In that time he made 52 films, and in today's Review section our film critic Tim Robey appraises every one of them (itself no mean achievement). As those reviews show, not every Hitchcock film deserves to be remembered - the musical biopic Waltzes from Vienna (1934), for example, has few defenders - but can any other director lay claim to having made a great film in every one of six successive decades (the Seventies just makes it into that reckoning with Frenzy)? "A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it," the director once said. The BFI is giving us a valuable chance to see how often he delivered on that promise.