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“... of ourselves; and from A State of Independence his second novel (1986), to The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips, too, has been scrying for glimpses of troubled histories. The Nature of Blood opens in a Displaced Persons camp in Cyprus after the Second World War, where the British are holding Jews before releasing them in quotas to travel to Palestine; a ...”

“... its evidence no one is going to accuse David Dabydeen of an ‘assault on de Oxford dictionary’. Caryl Phillips, in his previous novel Higher Ground (1989), made efforts of a certain sort to tap the power of the ‘barbaric, broken utterance’ and turn it to harmonious effect. Higher Ground was a composite of three novellas, set in slave-trade ...”

“... In The Wasted Years, Caryl Phillips’s 1984 radio play, the young Solly Daniels writes a note to a girl asking her out: ‘Dear Jenny, I know that I don’t know you very well so please forgive me for just writing to you like this.’ ‘Where,’ asks the girl, ‘did he learn to write like that?’ That question resonates ...”

“... began this feuilleton in a hotel room, the Hyatt Regency in Houston, Texas: a Didionesque locale. (Caryl Phillips once told me that he liked to write his books in faraway hotel rooms. I admire that. It brings to mind Janet Flanner at the Ritz and James Schuyler at the Chelsea.) Joan Didion has often noted transiency’s allure, a writer’s necessary ...”

“... apparent deprivation. And it is written with a sparse lyricism which is extraordinarily affecting. Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts in 1958. In the same year, his family came to England where he has been brought up. A State of Independence is his second novel and is set (with a little precautionary evasion as to names) in his native island, on the eve ...”

“... memory left after their time is over. Some account of the organic nature of tennis is missing from Caryl Phillips’s rather too random compilation, The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis, which I had looked forward to reading as an anthology that starts with Suzanne Lenglen and ends more or less with Venus Williams. The game’s tissue, if you will, is ...”

“... edge is blunted, the resettlement myth persists. Ulyssean travelogues are few and far between in Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage and the novels of Paule Marshall, but families uproot themselves. Their stories correspond, but not in time or place. Phillips’s travellers leave their small Caribbean island for ...”

“... at Falklands time. The colonial impulse is seen at its most brutal in the first part of Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground, a novel made up of three episodes linked by theme, but not by time, place or characters. In a West African fort, as the slave trade wanes, a black man, a factor despised by both Africans and Europeans, survives because he is ...”

“... has brought about in Britain or the United States; it’s hard, too, to imagine Toni Morrison or Caryl Phillips being asked to take charge of such matters. As Christopher Miller points out in The French Atlantic Triangle, in France ‘literature was one of the most important battlegrounds for the debate on slavery.’ But in spite of the wealth of ...”

“... if I was carrying a rare and deadly virus. The jamboree included a lecture on Walcott’s work by Caryl Phillips, the launch of an edition of his poetry selected by Glyn Maxwell, a former student, and a screening of a new Dutch documentary about him.* The film was shown in the presence of the governor-general, who wore a St Lucian blue twinset. Alongside ...”

“... account is the most significant of the many passages from the literature of slavery that Caryl Phillips recycles in his novel Cambridge (1991). Inventing a backstory, he decided that Cambridge had been married to Christiana, and that his feelings towards her, if vindictive at all, were stirred up by Brown, who, in a repulsive episode reported by ...”

“... It is the law of institutions. Like Tesco the police must grow. 22 October. Mention in a piece by Caryl Phillips in today’s Guardian of a school in Leeds against which his school used to play football. ‘When I was a boy, we used to play football against a secondary school with the somewhat hopeful name of Leeds Modern. The joke, of course, was there ...”

“... several of the contemporary writers whose work he discusses are preoccupied with the 18th century. Caryl Phillips’s play The Shelter (1984) tells of ‘an elegant 18th-century West Country lady who finds herself marooned on a desert island with a slave whom she despises but is wholly reliant on’. David Dabydeen, whose 1987 book, Hogarth’s ...”