Bøker av Philip Ayres

The first biography ever written of Australia's most eminent judge, Sir Owen Dixon (1886-1972)."I think that Owen Dixon is splendid. I couldn't put it down. The man and his method come through better than I thought was possible." Sir Daryl Dawson, formerly Justice of the High Court of AustraliaThis is the first biography ever published of Australia's most eminent judge, Sir Owen Dixon (1886-1972).In twentieth-century Australia, Dixon is a towering figure. He was regarded by Justice Felix Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court, and by Lord Simonds and other English Law Lords, as the greatest exponent of the common law of his generation anywhere in the world.Dixon sat on the High Court from 1929 to 1964, and was Chief Justice from 1952 to 1964. He was also Minister to Washington (Ambassador) from 1942 to 1944, and a UN-appointed mediator between India and Pakistan over Kashmir from May to September 1950.Through the use of Dixon's private papers-including his private diaries, never previously published-Philip Ayres gives the text a strong sense of momentum, interiority and continuing drama. He focuses on the most interesting cases, and involves the reader closely in Dixon's numerous trips to England and the USA, his activities in wartime Washington, his tour of the New Guinea fronts in 1943, and the extensive Himalayan travel and exploration involved in his mediation over Kashmir.A narrative seamlessly integrating both the private and professional figure, Owen Dixon is a most important contribution on events at the commanding heights of politics and law in Australia across much of the twentieth century.

The private encounters described in this new book stretched from 1967 to the present and were the products of friendship, research, happenstance, curiosity or calculated risk. From Gerald Ford to Robert Mugabe, they're taken as found: an ascendant Soviet leader, abandoning his tour group for more interesting company, a charismatic Jamaican socialist whose policies split his island into warring halves, an African president-for-life who believed that all power is based in violence, another next door with his own distinctive system of things, a first lady of Fascism, the most right-wing judge on the U.S. Supreme Court, a Somali general in an anarchic world of his own making, an Ulster firebrand tamed by time and fatal prognosis, Afghan jihadists funded by an America whose culture they hate, Iranian revolutionaries and various other stand-outs in this panorama of personalities.The point of view is as judgmental as a tape recorder. If there's an attitude it's open-minded, sceptical and a shade cynical, proceeding from a working assumption that much of what we've read or been taught is at least partly false, often entirely false.

In the heroic age of polar exploration, Sir Douglas Mawson stands in first rank. In this biography Mawson's many achievements are illuminated, which enabled us to understand the human side to the man.