You're absolutely right about British newspapers using double quotes nowadays, but British books still use single quotes, as far as I can tell. An interesting

You're absolutely right about British newspapers using double quotes nowadays, but British books still use single quotes, as far as I can tell. An interesting question to ask, and a harder one to answer is: what kind of quotation marks did people use in handwriting at different points in history? I'm not totally sure about this, but I think there's a long tradition of people in Britain using double quotation marks in hardwriting, in particular, for school. So I suspect that there is a long tradition of the choice of quotation mark being context-dependent. So using single marks in books but double marks in newspapers isn't as strange as it might seem.