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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.
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. 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, 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 (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, According to WorldCat, the book is held in 398 librariesHe 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 (clerical) 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 (1986) and Somalia (1992), and with the Hezb-i-Islami jihadists in Afghanistan in 1987.