SOURCE: "English Lessons," in The New Yorker, Vol. 68, No. 25, August 10, 1992, pp. 76-9.

In the following excerpt, Pierpont analyzes Cambridge in the context of Phillips's other works.

In the introduction to his play The Shelter, produced in 1983, when he was twenty-five, the British writer Caryl Phillips described a postcard photograph that he had kept pinned to the wall above his desk for over a year: "A white woman's face, probably that of a woman of thirty or thirty-five, who had probably just cried, or who would cry; and curled around her forehead, with just enough pressure to cause a line of folds in the skin above her eyes, were two black hands; obviously power and strength slept somewhere within them but at this moment they were infinitely gentle, describing with eight fingers that moment when a grip of iron weakens to a caress of love." The story of the...