Philip James Ayres


Philip James Ayres is an Australian biographer and literary historian, described by High Court Justice Dyson Heydon AC as "one of the best biographers this country has ever produced". He is of German and Anglo-Scottish cultural heritage, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a recipient of the Centenary Medal in 2001 for contributions to literature.

Biography

He attended Adelaide Boys High School and the University of Adelaide. He has taught at the University of Adelaide, Monash University, Vassar College and Boston University. He has been twice married. He lives in Melbourne and Camperdown.

Academic work

His biography subjects include Malcolm Fraser, Douglas Mawson, former Australian Chief Justice Sir Owen Dixon, Sydney's late-19th-century, early-20th-century Catholic Archbishop Patrick Francis Moran and Sir Ninian Stephen. His most recent book, a collection of biographical vignettes built around personal one-on-one encounters with numerous internationally significant people quite aside from the subjects of his biographies, is Private Encounters in the Public World.
His literary-historical books include Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England, According to WorldCat, the book is held in 398 libraries He is the editor of the two-volume Clarendon Press edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.
The British Law Quarterly Review described his Owen Dixon as a "conspicuous success" in marrying "distinguished scholarship and narrative skills", while the Australian Law Journal devoted a 14-page section to complimentary analyses of the same book. 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, although the author has been chastised by one critic for declining to moralise his avowedly non-moral and objectivist presentation of character.
He has also written first-hand accounts of several conflict zones, having travelled with Malcolm Fraser in South Africa and Somalia, and with the Hezb-i-Islami jihadists in Afghanistan in 1987.

Books