I love reading the kind of English that English people write. It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. I was thinking about this recently after coming across this footnote from “Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop,” by Bob Stanley:

Mantovani’s atmospheric arrangement on ‘Care Mia’, I should add, is something else. Genuinely celestial. If anyone with a degree of subtlety was singing, it would be quite a record.

It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what makes this passage specifically English, but there’s something about it . . .

P.S. Mark Liberman reports that, in combination, several of the words and phrases in the above quote indeed supply strong evidence (“odds of better than 50 to 1 in favor of a British origin”).