Name Roland Hill Role Journalist | Died June 21, 2014 | |
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Books Lord Acton, Scotland: Land of Lochs an, A Time out of Joint, Burnt toast on Sundays | ||
Roland Hill (2 December 1920 – 21 June 2014) was a German-born British journalist and author of the first modern biography of Lord Acton.
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He was born in Hamburg. His father, Rudolf Hess, was a sugar trader and his mother an opera singer. Both his parents were Jews, but they brought Roland up as a Lutheran. With Hitler's rise to power, the family moved to Prague, Vienna and Milan. In 1937, in Vienna, he was received into the Catholic church and took up journalism. In 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War he was in London, working for Austrian and German newspapers, and in 1940 he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien. He later joined a Scottish Infantry regiment in the British Army, changing his name in case he was captured.
In London, where he died, he worked for The Tablet and as correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Presse and others.