Sometime ago I read about SQL language drawbacks (the basic language specification, not vendor specific),

and one of the drawbacks was that the language does not allow to create a set of tuples that don't come from a table.
For instance,

SELECT firstName, lastName from people;

this creates a set of tuples coming from the table people.

Now, if I don't have this table people, and I want to return a constant, I'd need something like this to return a set of two tuples (this would not require to have a table):

SELECT VALUES('james', 'dean'), ('tom', 'cruisse');

Why I would need that?
Because of the same reasons that we can define constants (not only basic types, but objects and arrays also) in any advanced programming language.

Workarounds,
Yes, I could create a temporal table, fill the data, and SELECT from that table. This is a hack, to overcome the drawbacks of the poor SQL language.

I think that I read about this somewhere in "The Third Manifesto",
but I don't find the paragraph/example talking about this concrete drawback anymore.

Do you know a reference about it?