Roderick Taylor was brought up in India and the Middle East, and has always had a great interest in the art of the area. He studied Oriental languages at Cambridge, and his career as an International Management Consultant has kept him traveling around the world, giving him the ideal opportunity to research the textiles in the places where they were made. He has been collecting Ottoman and Greek Island embroidery since 1957, and has built up a wide and impressive collection. He is a lecturer on these and other textiles and contributes to Hali, the specialist textile magazine, as well as the Macmillan Dictionary of Art and the British Museum publication 5000 Years of Textiles.