Philip James Ayres

Philip James Ayres (born 28 July 1944 at Lobethal, South Australia) is an Australian biographer and literary historian, of German and Anglo-Scottish cultural heritage, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (London), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a recipient of the Centenary Medal in 2001 for contributions to literature.^[1]

Biography

He attended Adelaide Boys High School and the University of Adelaide (PhD 1971). He has taught at the University of Adelaide, Monash University, Vassar College and Boston University.^[2] He has been twice married (1965 to Maruta Sudrabs; 1981 to Patricia Monypenny née San Martin). He lives in Melbourne and Camperdown (Western Victoria).

Academic work

His biography subjects include Malcolm Fraser,^[3] Douglas Mawson,^[4] former Australian Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon,^[5] Sydney's late-19th-century, early-20th-century Catholic Archbishop Patrick Francis Moran^[6] and Sir Ninian Stephen^[7] (who had been Australia's Governor-General for most of the 1980s).

His literary-historical books include Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England,^[8] According to WorldCat, the book is held in 398 libraries ^[9] He is the editor of the two-volume Clarendon Press edition of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks.^[10]

The British Law Quarterly Review described his Owen Dixon as a “conspicuous success” in marrying “distinguished scholarship and narrative skills”,^[11] while the Australian Law Journal devoted a 14-page section to complimentary analyses of the same book.^[12] Fortunate Voyager, the account of Sir Ninian Stephen's life, displays similar research and narrative methodologies. The other biographies have also received generally excellent reviews in the relevant professional journals,^[13] although the author has been chastised by one (clerical) critic for declining to moralise his avowedly non-moral and objectivist presentation of character^[14]

He has also written first-hand accounts of several conflict zones, having travelled with Malcolm Fraser in South Africa (1986)^[15] and Somalia (1992),^[16] and with the Hezb-i-Islami jihadists in Afghanistan in 1987.^[17]

Bibliography

• Ayres, Philip (1979). Tourneur: The Revenger's Tragedy. London: Edward Arnold.
• — Malcolm Fraser : a biography. Richmond, Vic.: William Heinemann Australia. 1987. 

• — (1997). Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• — (1999). Mawson: A Life. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press.

• — (2003). Owen Dixon. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press.

• — (2007). Owen Dixon (revised edition). Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press.

• — (2007). Prince of the Church : Patrick Francis Moran, 1830-1911. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press. 

• — (2013) Fortunate Voyager: The Worlds of Ninian Stephen. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press.

• — (ed.) (1980) Anthony Munday, The English Roman Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• — (ed.) (1987) Ben Jonson: Sejanus His Fall. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

• — (ed.) (1999) Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• — Numerous scholarly articles in U.S. academic journals include "Burlington's Library at Chiswick", Studies in Bibliography, 45 (1992), pp. 113-127; and "The Nature of Jonson's Roman History", English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), pp. 166-181.

References

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