Having developed a friendship with Alfred Hitchcock during the 1970s, he became Hitchcock's authorised biographer. In 1978, after publishing "Hitch", Taylor returned to the UK, becoming the art critic for "The Times", a post that he held until 2005. His other books since 1978 include "Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933–1950" (1983), and bio-critical studies of Ingrid Bergman (1983), Alec Guinness (1984), Vivien Leigh (1984), Orson Welles (1986), Elizabeth Taylor (1991), film historian John Kobal (2008) and the artists Edward Wolfe (1986), Peter Samuelson (1987), Robin Tanner (1989), Bernard Meninsky (1990), John Copley (1990), Muriel Pemberton (1993), Ricardo Cinalli (1993), Claude Monet (1995), Bill Jacklin (1997), Cyril Mann (1997), Peter Coker (2002), Zsuzsi Roboz (2005), Peter Prendergast (2006), Panayiotis Kalorkoti (2007), Carl Laubin (2007), Philip Sutton (2008), Kurt Jackson (2010), Philip Hicks (2013) and Paul Day (2016). More general books on art include "Impressionist Dreams" (1990) and "Exactitude: Hyperrealist Art Today" (2009).