I'm reading an autobiography that was published in England, and I notice that whenever there is dialog, they use single quotation marks: 'You must have been the class clown.' 'No, I wasn't, but I did sit next to him.'
In AmE, we use double quotation marks for dialog: "You must have been the class clown." (etc)
We use single quotation marks (I believe they're called "inverted commas" in BE) when enclosing a quote within a quotation: "Dybbyck shmybbyck, I said 'more ham!'".
