I would very much like to express my general feelings about Bill Phillips. He was a most remarkable man, extremely simple and straightforward. He was a real genius in that he always saw the main point at issue, spoke of it with the utmost directness and in the simplest possible language, and produced comments and suggestions about it which were somehow obvious when he expressed them but which everyone else had somehow or another overlooked or had muddled up by trying to be clever about them. I was, in theory, his supervisor for his Ph. D. but our meetings simply meant that I learnt from him an immense amount about things about which I knew nothing. On one occasion, after a general sophisticated discussion in the LSE senior common room, he said to me: ‘You English puzzle me. In order to understand what you are saying, I have to listen between the lines. ’ You never had to ‘listen between the lines’ to Bill's commonsensical arguments.

One anecdote shows how directly he was prepared to tackle any problem. He stayed with us one summer in a cottage which contained a broken-down out-of-tune old piano. We moaned what a pity that it was so out of tune that we really could not use it. Bill went to his car, fetched his spanner and set to work tuning the piano. He never complained about a difficulty; he just worked out how to put it right and then proceeded to do so.