“... the gauche Uncle Tannous (a diminutive of Antonius/Anthony) on a weekly sitcom called The Danny Thomas Show. Danny Thomas was the son of Maronite Christian immigrants from Kahlil Gibran’s village, Becharre, in north Lebanon. His assimilation was so thorough that he took the Al Jolson role of cantor’s son in a 1952 ...”

“... for parallels. The most attractive of Wright’s portraits of couples – that of the Reverend Thomas Gibson and his wife Mary, for example – have the quality of a Jane Austen happy ending: ordinariness is not glamorised, good feeling is celebrated. The finish and-detail of his paintings often look Dutch, and give good value inch by well-painted ...”

“... founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective cultural psyche’, and he ...”

“... from Paris to Geneva and the Alps, where he made some new friends, among them Shelley’s cousin, Thomas Medwin. Shelley and his dependants had themselves been floating from one Italian town to another, from Milan to Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Naples, Rome, Leghorn and Florence, reaching Pisa early in 1820. Two years later, Trelawny joined them there. For ...”

“... receives the most discourteous rebuff of all – at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind ...”

“... restricts national power. In recent opinions, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have described the political system established by the Constitution as a confederation of quasi-sovereign States, leaving almost no role for the federal government. Having a written constitution, clearly, does not preclude bitter controversy over how the ...”

“... be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William Hone. He certainly should be. Hone is one of the ‘national heroes of our past’ who struggled to secure our freedoms and to widen the franchise. He fought hard to resist the encroachment of the executive on the province of the judiciary, and now that ...”

“... Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ‘British’ culture, rather than one badged as ‘English’. In the wake of Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse (first published ...”

“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... decades of American Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 ...”

“... regarded as a pillar of modern British statehood just as significant as the Bill of Rights (which William and Mary had accepted before they replaced James II): the Act of Union of 1707. I seem to recall that in the summer of 1974 we went to the Lake District. Strangely, though, when I left home for university at the end of the decade, the English literature I ...”

“... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... the rights of the accused, or the dictates of justice. Bullying opportunists like J. Parnell Thomas, later jailed, and Joseph McCarthy, together with such men as John E. Rankin and Richard M. Nixon, posed as crusaders, hounding writers, actors, directors, and ordinary citizens whose political opinions were their only crime. The ensuing black list ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... his earliest intellectual heroes were English and Continental humanists of the Renaissance – Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Erasmus – questing, chivalric figures who pursued their arduous scholarly experiments in a landscape fraught with dangers and temptations (Smallwood also discerns a ‘tantalising’ series of parallels with Montaigne). Those ...”