Such was England as represented by Mayhem Parva. It was, of course, a mythical kingdom, a fly-in-amber land. It was derived in part from the ways and values of a society that had begun to fade away from the very moment of the shots at Sarajevo; in part from that remarkably durable sentimentality which, even today, can be expressed in the proposition that every church clock has stopped at 14.50 hours and honey is a perpetual comestible at vicarages. It offered not outward escape, as did books of travel, adventure, international intrigue, but inward – into a sort of museum of nostalgia.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Such was England as represented by Mayhem Parva. It was, of course, a mythical kingdom, a fly-in-amber land. It was derived in part from the ways and values of a society that had begun to fade away from the very moment of the shots at Sarajevo; in part from that remarkably durable sentimentality which, even today, can be expressed in the proposition that every church clock has stopped at 14.50 hours and honey is a perpetual comestible at vicarages. It offered not outward escape, as did books of travel, adventure, international intrigue, but inward – into a sort of museum of nostalgia." in the context of "Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience (1971), p. 171" to mean that wisdom is timeless.