He is the author of critical studies of British theatre; of critical biographies of such figures in film as Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, and Ingrid Bergman; of Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres 1933–1950 (1983); and several books on art.
During this era, Taylor wrote books including Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962), titled The Angry Theatre in the USA; revised and expanded and published in paperback (1969); Anatomy of a Television Play (1962), concerning the Armchair Theatre productions Afternoon of a Nymph and The Rose Affair; Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties (1964); and The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (1966).
Subsequently, he wrote The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre (1966), The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967), The Art Dealers (1969) and The Hollywood Musical (1971), as well as British Council monographs on Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer and David Storey.
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).
In 2013, an e-book edition of Hitch with a long introductory chapter giving the history of his relationship with Hitchcock was published, and five of his early books, Anger and After, The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, The Second Wave, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear and Directors and Directions, were reprinted as part of the Routledge classic critical text series.