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.