Andrew Roth (23 April 1919 - 12 August 2010) was a biographer and journalist known for his compilation of Parliamentary Profiles, a directory of biographies of British Members of P...view moreAndrew Roth (23 April 1919 - 12 August 2010) was a biographer and journalist known for his compilation of Parliamentary Profiles, a directory of biographies of British Members of Parliament. Active amongst the politicians and journalists in Westminster for sixty years, he also made appearances on British television.
Roth’s detailed obituaries were composed for international and national figures of note, using the skills and information he had collected in his biographical research. A catalogue of his published obituaries in the archives of The Guardian provides a historical perspective to contemporary news as the deaths of the noteworthy are documented and he reviews their lives.
He was born to Hungarian parents in New York City and attended City College and Columbia, Michigan and Harvard universities, where he studied Far Eastern History. During 1940 he was a researcher at the Institute of Pacific Relations. He served as a Lieutenant with the U.S. Naval Intelligence in World War II. In June 1945 he and five others were arrested during an FBI investigation into the leaking of documents to the journal Amerasia, but he was subsequently cleared.
Roth was a journalist and foreign correspondent in twenty countries before settling in the United Kingdom in 1950. He was political correspondent for the Manchester Evening News from 1972-1984, contributed to the New Statesman from 1984-1997 and was an obituarist and contributor to The Guardian from 1996.
Roth died of prostate cancer in 2010 at the age of 91.view less