Carola Hicks

[1] She was born Carola Brown in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, and educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles School and the University of Edinburgh, where she took a first in archaeology in 1964.

Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on "Origins of the animal style in English Romanesque art".

[2] Hicks worked at the British Museum researching the Sutton Hoo ship burial, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and then curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral.

[3] In 2006, her book on the history of the Bayeux Tapestry proposed a new theory on its origins, that is was commissioned in England by Edith Godwinson, the sister of King Harold and widow of Edward the Confessor.

[1] Angela Thirlwell describes Hicks as a "glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art", who "swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public".