including Howard Skempton and Phillips himself. Phillips began contributing regular reviews to The Times Literary Supplement (now TLS). At the beginning of the 1980s he designed a series of tapestries for his old Oxford college and he returned to portraiture with a portrait of Pella Erskine-Tulloch (the bookbinder who bound Phillips' favourite version of A Humument in three volumes). Erskine-Tulloch would become the subject of a series of weekly sittings which he described as "Pella on Sunday". He had moved out of the family home at 102 Grove Lane and moved back into his studio at 57 Talfourd Road in Peckham. A man with a great pleasure in habit, he would lunch every Tuesday in the Choumert Café on Choumert Road. His private limited edition of his own translation of Dante's Inferno illustrated with his prints was published in 1983 and in 1984 he was elected a Royal Academician. Peter Greenaway and Phillips co-directed A TV Dante with John Gielgud and Bob Peck, which was broadcast on Channel 4 television in 1986. During this time he also collaborated with Malcolm Bradbury, Adrian Mitchell, Jake Auerbach, Richard Minsky and Heather McHugh. At the beginning of the 1990s Phillips painted portraits of the Monty Python team and produced a glass screen and paintings for The Ivy restaurant in London. He illustrated Plato's Symposium for the Folio Society (for whom he would illustrate Waiting for Godot in 1999), completed his Curriculum Vitae series of paintings and saw a new Works and Texts book published. In 1994 he went to Harvard as Artist in Residence at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and published Merely Connect, which he had written with Salman Rushdie during a series of portrait sittings. With the move to a new studio in Bellenden Road and a change of ownership of the Choumert Café, Phillips began to lunch regularly opposite his studio at the Crossroads Café, where he could be found reading literary magazines through his blue-rimmed spectacles. As part of the Africa95 celebration of African arts throughout Britain, he curated the 1995 exhibition Africa: the Art of a Continent for the Royal Academy and became their Chairman of Exhibitions. Phillips began to move into new areas in the mid-1990s: stage design, The Postcard Century for Thames & Hudson (building on his passion for postcards), quilting, mud drawings and wire structures. All his old projects continued and he began