The Best Line in the Book

I've just finished reading P. D. James's Talking About Detective Fiction (Knopf). The best sentence in the book is the one in which she defines the England in which she grew up, "an ordered society in which virtue  was regarded as normal, crime an aberration":
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As I was born in 1920, it was an England I knew, a cohesive world, overwhelmingly white and united by a common belief in a religious and moral code based on the Judeo-Christian inheritance -- even if this belief was not invariably reflected in practice -- and buttressed by social and political institutions  which, although they might be criticized, attracted general allegiance, and were accepted as necessary to the well-being of the state: the monarchy, the Empire, the Church, the criminal justice system, the City, the ancient universities.
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DL