Roderick MacFarquhar was born on 2 December 1930 in Lahore, Punjab, British India [now Pakistan]. He was married to Dalena Wright and Emily Jane Cohen. He died on 10 February 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
His father was a British diplomat who became a high-ranking United Nations official. Dr. MacFarquhar grew up in India and Scotland, served in the British military, and graduated from the University of Oxford. He received a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard. After serving five years in the UK House of Commons, he completed a doctorate at the London School of Economics and held several academic fellowships before joining the faculty at Harvard; he taught well into his 80s.