Saturday, February the 27th, 2010
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The greatest parenthesis in literature has already been written, and will never be improved upon. It is from Lolita, where Nabokov writes: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”
But one must always be on the lookout for superb phrases, or complete sentences, in parentheses, and there is a fine example in today's Guardian. Into her review of The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders, Lucy Hughes-Hallett drops this marvel: “(Rumour had it he kept a tortoise in his sporran.)”
(One day I must set to work on an anthology of great parentheses.)