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.)

“When Violet and Denys finally get married, after Vita decides just before the wedding not to go through with the plan for the two women to elope (she had heard from Harold, and ‘something snapped in my mind’), the honeymooners and Vita all find themselves in Paris together, and Vita takes Violet away from Denys (‘I wanted to say “Don’t you know, you stupid fool, she is mine in every sense of the word?”), then Denys takes her back from Vita (‘That night I dined at the Ritz, and from the open window of her room Violet watched me, and Denys sobbed in the room behind her’, and the general conclusion is that ‘That day seems to have made a great impression upon him’ – well, I suppose it would) after which ‘they went away to St Jean de Luz, and I went to Switzerland with Harold’, and then they all go back to England, but soon the girls are off again, to Paris (‘I used to sit in cafés drinking coffee, and watching people go by’ – fancy!) and Monte Carlo (‘divine’), where ‘a complication arose over Denys announcing his arrival at Cannes’ (by now his blue eyes must have been damned near falling out of his head, never mind starting), and they all form twos again and go back to London, but then Violet goes off to Amiens, where Vita is to join her, for ever this time, only when Vita follows she takes Denys along, which complicates the situation until Denys says he will leave them and never come back (‘Denys cried the whole way’), but he does come back, this time travelling with Harold and only a couple of lengths behind Violet’s father, and then Harold actually suggests that Violet may have slept with her own husband (‘I thought I should have gone mad when she said that’) so Vita makes a scene and goes off with Harold from Amiens to Paris, and Violet’s father catches the same train, but no sooner do they get to Paris than Violet turns up (maybe she was at the other end of the train), and the two girls go up to Harold’s and Vita’s room, whereupon Harold bursts in with Denys (how many people were on that train, for God’s sake?), and Denys swears that he has never done anything unbecoming with his own wife (‘I promise you there has never been anything of that kind between Violet and me’), which mollifies Vita a little, ‘but still it was bad enough that she should have deceived me even to a certain extent’, and then it all gets rather confused, except that at one point Vita goes to Paris, Violet goes to Bordighera and Denys goes to Cornwall (no mention of Harold – perhaps he’s just gone to bed), and among other places visited by the various parties are Avignon, San Remo and Venice – oh, now I remember where Harold was – he says he has been ‘spending his time with rather low people, the demi-monde’, and he sums up by saying ‘my heart feels like a pêche melba’, and then Violet fades away and Harold and Vita live happily ever after, apart from Vita’s having an affair with Virginia Woolf, and another one, just to vary things, with Geoffrey Scott, while Harold…

“The long and the short of the matter is that practically everybody in this ludicrous story has a nice comfortable income, apart from the charwoman whom Vita steps across when visiting Violet early one morning, and of whom she says ‘There was a dreary slut scrubbing the doorstep’. When you have plenty of money you can not only afford to rush about between London and Amiens and Paris (where you stay at the Ritz, of course – well, I mean, doesn’t everybody?) and San Remo and Bordighera and Monte Carlo and Avignon and Venice; you can also afford (if you are silly enough to want to) to spend your time striking grotesque poses, keening over your own emotions, and saying things like ‘I had been vouchsafed insight, as one sometimes is’. The ‘dreary slut’ scrubbing the doorstep could no more afford the poses than she could afford the travel, and I would dearly like to read her diary, particularly if it contained a passage about some stupid, snobbish, affected woman who stepped right on to her nice clean doorstep the minute after she had just whitewashed the bleedin’ thing.”

Bernard Levin, reviewing Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson in The Observer, 28 October 1973, collected in Taking Sides (1979).

ADDENDUM : Elsewhere in the collection, Levin writes thus of Yoko Ono’s husband (in 1974): “There is nothing wrong with Mr Lennon that could not be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head falls out.”

Could it be that the shade of Christopher Smart is haunting the corridors of a large and important municipal building in far away Oregon? This unlikely question is prompted by a discovery made by Brit over at Think Of England. In the course of his valuable research into the Official State Crustaceans of the USA, Brit unearthed House Joint Resolution 37 from the Oregon Legislative Assembly, adopted in 2009.

There is nobody called Smart among the Representatives and Senators who passed the Resolution, but it is clear to me that the mad poet’s spirit hovered over whomsoever drafted it. Granted, it uses “Whereas” rather than Christopher Smart’s favoured “Let”s and “For”s in Jubilate Agno, but otherwise this could be a lost fragment of that great poem:

Whereas the Dungeness crab fishery is the most valuable single-species fishery in Oregon, making Dungeness crab an important part of Oregon’s economy; and

Whereas the Dungeness crab is an iconic Oregon symbol; and

Whereas the Dungeness crab is the most delicious of the crab species; and

Whereas the Dungeness crab annual harvest begins each year on December 1, when Dungeness crabs are hard-shelled, full of meat and in their prime; and

Whereas the Dungeness crab harvest ends on August 14 to minimize handling, so that post-molt, soft-shelled crabs can fill out undisturbed; and

Whereas this management method has served the resource well for decades and ensures that the Dungeness crab fishery is truly sustainable; now, therefore,

Be It Resolved by the Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon:

That the Dungeness crab is the official crustacean of the State of Oregon.

More at Agence Eureka

One can truncate it slightly, and omit the inverted commas, without altering the essential meaning. This is the best headline since that business about Blunkett and the cow:

Norman Tebbit attacks child in dragon outfit

NOTE : Hmm. The Daily Mail has changed the headline on its story, thus making my truncation and omission comments meaningless. All I can say is that it’s a good job I posted this version before it was lost.

Here are two things I learned today, which, taken together, have planted in my brain the idea of writing A Dictionary Of Great Composers. These would be the complete entries for those named, and dozens, nay, hundreds of others would be similarly brief:

Schubert, Franz. Upon his deathbed, his final wish was that someone would bring him some books by James Fenimore Cooper.

Tippett, Michael. He referred to the refrigerator in his kitchen as “Bernard Levin”.

John F Ptak at the invaluable Ptak Science Books blog has a superb post on Ranter and anti-Ranter pamphlets of the 17th century, in which he celebrates their way with titles, like this one:

Hell broke loose: or, the notorious design of the wicked Ranters, discovered on Sunday last at Black-Fryers Being a true relation of the strange proceedings of Mr. Vaughan, and his wicked proselytes; and their entring of Black-Fryers church in sermon time, like so many spirits from hell, with four damnable papers in the hands, containing such horrible, audacious, and abominable songs, the like not to be parallel’d in former ages. With the manner how this onsolent Ranter traced the streets from Black-Fryers to Saint Paul’s Church-yard, in his Holland shirt, without doublet or breeches, a treble cap, like the Pope’s miter, with silk fring, and white shooes, and stockings. With their damnable plots, and conspiracies against the ministers of the gospel: their examination before the right honourable the Lord Mayor of London; the sad and woful speeched, made by the ringleader of the Ranters, concerning the city magistrates, and golden chains: and the committing of them to Bridewell till the next sessions. 1650

“Snow! Gor had traveled far, but never had he seen a storm like this with white cold in the air. Again a shiver that was part fear rippled through his muscles and gripped with invisible fingers at his knotted arms.

“‘The Beast of the North is angry!’ he told himself.

“Through the dark and storm, animals drifted past before the blasts of cold. They were fleeing; they were full of fear – fear of something that the dull mind of Gor could not picture. But in that mind was the same wordless panic.

“Gor, the man-animal of that pre-glacial day, stared wondering, stupidly, into the storm with eyes like those of the wild pig. His arms were long, almost to his knees; his hair, coarse and matted, hung in greasy locks about his savage face. Behind his low, retreating forehead was place for little of thought or reason. Yet Gor was a man…”

From Two Thousand Miles Below : A Four-Part Novel by Charles Willard Diffin, published in Astounding Stories between June 1932 and January 1933. New research suggests Diffin may have been writing about a fictionalised version of the Grunty Man who is, as we know, older than the Earth itself.