Why is it that American writers have difficulty writing English speech, and British writers have difficulty writing American? “True virtuosity, in fact, lies in the simple ability to render a single line of speech in a way that sounds like a real person talking. There aren’t many novelists, in reality, who can reliably do this even if the character shares their own nationality, class and position. The number of novelists who can bring off a character speaking the same language from a different country, no matter how apparently familiar the cadences and accent, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Not so smashing, after all.”