Born in Swansea, a city in Wales, Hicks read mathematics at King's College London during the mid-1960s and worked for roughly a quarter of century as a computer systems analyst at the University of London (retired 1993). Although he was educated in the field of mathematics and computer science, his personal obsession with baroque music led him to pursue scholarly music research in his spare time. What began as more or less a hobby developed into a highly distinguished para-career as a historian and writer. He became one of the leading 20th-century scholars on George Frideric Handel.
