AYRES, Philip 1944–

(Philip James Ayres)

PERSONAL:

Born July 28, 1944, in South Australia; son of James Francis (a grazier) and Mabel Agnes Ayres; married, December, 1965; wife's name Maruta (divorced, 1981); married Patricia Margarita San-Martin, November, 1981; children: Julian Philip. Education: University of Adelaide, Ph.D., 1972. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Music, stereoscopic photography.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Glen Iris, Victoria, Australia; Camperdown, Victoria, Australia.

CAREER:

Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia, lecturer, 1972-79, senior lecturer, 1980-93, associate professor of English, 1994-2006, professorial fellow, 2006—. Visiting professorial fellow at Vassar College, 1993, and Boston University, 2001. Australian Council, deputy chair of literature board, 2000-02.

MEMBER:

Royal Historical Society (fellow), Australian Academy of the Humanities (fellow), Melbourne Club.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Centenary Medal, 2001.

WRITINGS:

Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy, Edward Arnold (London, England), 1977.

(Editor) Anthony Munday, The English Roman Life, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1980.

Malcolm Fraser: A Biography, Heinemann (Richmond, Victoria, Australia), 1987.

(Editor) Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.

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

(Editor) Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Mawson: A Life, Miegunyah (Carlton, Victoria, Australia), 1999.

Owen Dixon, Miegunyah (Carlton, Victoria, Australia), 2003.

The Worlds of Cardinal Moran, Miegunyah (Carlton, Victoria, Australia), 2007.

Contributor of articles and short stories to scholarly journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Philip Ayres is a biographer and historian. In Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England, he shows how, following the Revolution of 1688, the ruling class promoted, by way of its patronage, a classical frame of mind embracing all the arts, on the foundations of "liberty" and "civic virtue." The historical fact of a Roman Britain lent the endeavor added authenticity, and it was partly out of an attachment to that past that a new "Roman" present was constructed by Lord Burlington and his circle. Essentially, a newly empowered oligarchy was dignifying and vindicating itself by association with an idealized imaged of republican Rome. This sense of affinity with the ideals of the free Roman Republic gave British classicism an authenticity impossible under the various versions of absolutism on the continent. The book is written "in a careful and scholarly manner," according to Leslie Mitchell in Notes and Queries. Mitchell concluded that "Ayres makes a valuable contribution."

Mawson: A Life is the biography of Australian explorer and geologist Sir Douglas Mawson, who headed an Australasian expedition in 1912 to map the coastline of Antarctica south of Australia. The book traces Mawson's roots to rural Yorkshire and follows the adventurer as he risks life and limb on several extended visits to Antarctica. "Philip Ayres's biography draws on the archival riches of the Mawson Institute, extensive research in other collections and a superb photographic record of Antarctic exploration," observed Times Literary Supplement reviewer Stuart Macintyre. "Ayres provides a shrewd assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a man who led by example, but 'was no hale companion.'"

Ayres once told CA: "My chief interests are literature, history, music, and stereoscopic photography. I have traveled widely in Africa, the Islamic world, and in Afghanistan with the resistance in 1987."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Australian Law Journal, October, 2003, Peter Heerey, review of Mawson: A Life, pp. 683-685.

Law Quarterly Review, January, 2005, Lord Bingham, review of Mawson, pp. 154-158.

Notes and Queries, September, 1998, Leslie Mitchell, review of Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 381.

Studies in English Literature, summer, 1998, Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, review of Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 553.

Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 1990; October 29, 1999, Stuart Macintyre, review of Mawson.