  We explore various aspects of top quark phenomenology at the Large Hadron
Collider and proposed future machines. After summarising the role of the top
quark in the Standard Model (and some of its well-known extensions), we discuss
the formulation of the Standard Model as a low energy effective theory. We
isolate the sector of this effective theory that pertains to the top quark and
that can be probed with top observables at hadron colliders, and present a
global fit of this sector to currently available data from the LHC and
Tevatron. Various directions for future improvement are sketched, including
analysing the potential of boosted observables and future colliders, and we
highlight the importance of using complementary information from different
colliders. Interpretational issues related to the validity of the effective
field theory formulation are elucidated throughout. Finally, we present an
application of artificial neural network algorithms to identifying
highly-boosted top quark events at the LHC, and comment on further refinements
of our analysis that can be made.
