The well-known Victorian critique of Cleopatra's behaviour as exemplified in Sarah Bernhardt's performance in Antony and Cleopatra: "How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen!".
The deftly worded farce and delightful understatement of his narratives has been compared to the work of P. G. Wodehouse, Ben Hecht and Ben Travers.
:"With irony, understatement, and artful compression ... Phillips distills the African diaspora to an essence, bitter, and unforgettable." —Entertainment Weekly