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).
More from 40 Under 40 Europe
Alia Al-Senussi
31, London, UK
Abdullah Al-Turki
34, London, UK
Donatien Grau
26. Critic, writer and academic Oxford, UK
Abraham Thomas
36. Director, Sir John Soane’s Museum London, UK