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“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... have been a monster: think of the diverse affections he inspired in Pope, Addison, Bolingbroke, Thomas Sheridan, Delany, Arbuthnot, Gay, many other men and at least a few women. In the end, Nokes praises Swift’s ‘essential honesty and humanity that made him prefer to seem a monster rather than a hypocrite’. It’s still not clear to me why he is ...”

“... In 1759, one of the leading figures in what Mugglestone calls the ‘prescriptive crusade’, Thomas Sheridan, father of the playwright (and an Irishman), is to be found giving an intensive course of lectures in the Sheldonian, cost one guinea, ‘on ELOCUTION, and the ENGLISH LANGUAGE (so far only as relates to elocution)’. The professional ...”

“... be described 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 ...”

“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable ...”

“... vanish from the title pages. The earliest, weightiest defence of the book came from Thomas Macaulay: his counterblast to Croker in the Whig Edinburgh Review was written to settle a private score, but he was sincere in his admiration. He found in the diary the same qualities of observation that in 1778 had made Evelina, in his view, the first ...”

“... from such lacerating anger. Johnson relied on the suspect testimony of the ardent Whig clergyman Thomas Birch, his source for the story that Swift’s servants charged for admission to view him. ‘And Swift expires, a driveller and a show,’ Johnson wrote in The Vanity of Human Wishes. Birch was another of those witnesses who derived some twisted ...”

“... 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of luvvies; it began with quite serious purposes and ambitions. With his rancorous first biographer, John Hawkins (Johnson coined the term ‘unclubbable’ for Hawkins, who after a few ...”

“... nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas Lockwood’s edition of Fielding’s drama. A third and final volume of plays is in preparation, and will complete the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding – a heroic project, begun in the 1960s, which has now outlived all but three members of ...”

“... best catches that plasticity in an image that recalls the similarly sandy and baby-faced Dylan Thomas. Churchill’s longest-lasting, albeit stormy, artistic relationship was with his cousin, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, who first made a head of him in 1919. Even for her he wouldn’t sit still for more than a few ...”

“... a kind of northern Eden, from which he has been twice excluded. The book ends with the 14-year-old Thomas leaving his beloved valley for the city and school. In fact, history, politics, had finally intervened, making the presence of Polish nationals increasingly uncomfortable in an independent Lithuania quarrelling with Poland over Wilno. But the valley was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”