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.)
Why am I irresistibly drawn to making this sentence a reality? :
‘Rumour had it he kept a tortoise in his sporran.’
No, I’m serious…
This seems an infinitely sensible way to care for a tortiose…
I mean, that Timothy Tortoise, in GSW’s garden, seemed to spend most of the year in the shubbery…
What kind of fun is that for the bairns…?
Yet if one kept ones tortoise in a sporran…
…hmmm…
Time I went to bed I feel…
O.S.M.
Perhaps I should recommend ‘(But I Digress)’ by John Lennard … aka ‘The Oxford Book of Brackets’.
It looks rather expensive at
http://www.amazon.com/But-Digress-Exploitation-Parentheses-English/dp/0198112475 but inter-library loans should be able to produce it for anyone of parenthetical inclination.