Phillips mentions Baldwin in relation to his book, The European Tribe: “I wrote a book which is 14 essays about different aspects of Europe. For instance, there’s an essay about James Baldwin in the South of France, there’s an essay about racialism in Mitterrand’s France. I was in Oslo when Desmond Tutu was getting his Nobel Prize, so there’s an essay about that and what happened around that. There’s an essay about meeting African students and Cubans in Moscow. The final essay is called The European Tribe which is quite autobiographical.”