It was a great pleasure last Friday to be able to talk about British film noir at a conference in Paris. The general feeling that participants seemed to have at the end of this three-day event was that they had even less idea about what British noir was than at the beginning. But as the term is so often associated with disillusionment, doubt and confusion, I found it paradoxically satisfying that we were not able to reach any neat answers. The quote from Denis Diderot on the