Maybe there is such a thing as a classically British style of argument--a kind of honorable pugnacity, if I can stereotype it. And maybe the words "abnormal" and "perverse" carry different connotations in the UK and the US (they remind me of John Ray and strike me as hilarious). But I'm reasonably sure that "copying" is a term of disparagement on both sides of the ocean, and that the labored insistence on "correct" and "wrong" readings is accurately described as "shrill" in the English-speaking world—particularly when the conclusion at issue (the viability of the 52-hypothesis) had already been conceded.

This might be more relevant than it appears in that, if this is a problem of translation (of sorts), then perhaps critics will also need to differentiate between the American and British inflections of Nabokov's voice(s) in the novel. This might begin to account for differences in responses to the character of John Ray, which could be crucially important to interpretations of the text. Has anyone attempted such a thing? I think that these notions of "British" and "American" would prove very difficult to bottle.