Suppose one is trying to estimate a high dimensional vector of parameters from a series of one observation per parameter. Often, it is possible to take advantage of sparsity in the parameters by thresholding the data in an appropriate way. A marginal maximum likelihood approach, within a suitable Bayesian structure, has excellent properties. For very sparse signals, the procedure chooses a large threshold and takes advantage of the sparsity, while for signals where there are many non-zero values, the method does not perform excessive smoothing. The scope of the method is reviewed and demonstrated, and various theoretical, practical and computational issues are discussed, in particularly exploring the wide potential and applicability of the general approach, and the way it can be used within more complex thresholding problems such as curve estimation using wavelets.