Like any academic discipline, art history needs figureheads who succeed in combining expert knowledge with popular appeal. Fox fits that bill. A fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge since the age of 28, he specialises in British and 20th-century art and will soon publish a monograph on British art and the First World War. But he has also made a number of acclaimed BBC arts documentaries, whose range has been broad and imaginative; they include the BAFTA-nominated British Masters (2011), A History of Art in Three Colours (2012) and A Very British Renaissance (2014).
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