The Estate of John Russell Taylor, author, critic & collector, heads to auction
JANUARY 2026. Olympia Auctions is honoured to present the private collection of John Russell Taylor (1935–2025), the authorised biographer of Alfred Hitchcock and one of Britain’s most influential cultural critics of the post-war era. The auction on February 11, 2026 will reveal a very personal insight into a writer whose talent spanned film, theatre, literature and the visual arts and whose intellectual curiosity shaped more than six decades of cultural debate.
Taylor is best known internationally for Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (1978), written with the director’s full cooperation and still regarded as the definitive biography of one of the most influential and recognisable filmmakers in the history of cinema. Over the course of Taylor’s career he wrote some 50 books, including studies of British drama, Hollywood cinema, Art Nouveau and modern painting, as well as serving as The Times’ theatre and film critic during the 1960s before becoming its art critic from 1978 until 2005. Educated at Dover Grammar School, Jesus College Cambridge, where he took a starred first in English and the Courtauld Institute of Art, Taylor combined scholarly rigour with an exceptional visual intelligence and memory.