And what does it mean in terms of the shifting nuances of power around the planet that the English, in the Fleming/Broccoli version of events, saved the world from the Soviet empire during the Cold War and today, according to Casino Royale, are saving it from 'international terrorism'?

Not that many people who go along to Casino Royale ponder its implications in geopolitical terms.

Most people must go simply because they've always gone, since the Bond movies have been around for 40 years. And because the films have a strangely reassuring relationship with reality. Ian Fleming mixed during his real-life war career with people, and was in on the planning and execution of escapades which paralleled, in a serious, life-or-death world those of the Bond world. But the Bond world is as far from seriousness as various real-life characters from MI5 mooching around bars in Belfast are from being entertaining.

British Intelligence, as filtered through the American sensibilities of the Broccoli production dynasty . . . is represented in this latest movie by Dame Judi Dench at her most Dame-ish. The baddies are: some very black Africans, some vaguely Arab-looking suicide bombers, a Greek no-goodnik and a villainous banker thought to be of Albanian origin. It is a cartoon version of the evil in our world. Just as the Bond version of the Cold War . . . SMERSH and Rosa Kleb and all that . . . was a Butlin's holiday camp, not only compared to the real, bleak, mass-murdering thing, but compared to the noir of Alec Guinness in the TV series playing John Le Carre's Smiley. On the other side, M and James Bond are a cartoon version of good. But cartoons always do assure the audience that pain doesn't hurt and catastrophe is always survived. The Bond movies are a cheerful, candycoloured version of the struggle between the virtuous and the wicked.

A recent book plays with the idea that there's a connection between the 1950s . . . when Britain was saying goodbye to the last of its empire and any real world power . . .

and the invention of the superhumanly powerful British hero, James Bond (b.1952). But is Bond plausibly British? Is he not more a hero who belongs to no time and no place?

Since time immemorial heroes go through terrible tests and endure torments to save the people and in the end are heaped with tribute.

The gadgets which 007 uses so effectively . . .

in this latest movie, computer information retrieval and GPS systems . . . are god-like appurtenances on the same lines as Hercules's winged heels or Fionn Mac Cumhail's thumb. The cars are god-appropriate accessories. So, of course, are the women. They're thinner now than they used to be and they have smaller breasts. But they're still stolidly middle-of-the-road examples of what female beauty is. They're still vamp-of-the-golf-club type women as . . . apart from the magnificent Ursula Andress . . . Bond women have always been. They're a majority choice.

What is quintessentially English, however, about the James Bond phenomenon is the frisson the English expect everyone to derive from contemplating their upper-class men.

Fleming himself, and Bond, went to Eton, and in theory it is exciting if an old Etonian strangles thugs with his bare hands and the like. As opposed to a thug strangling a thug.

But of course the Bond film stars were chosen by American filmmakers. So Bond has been an American idea of an upperclass Englishman rather than a realistic portrayal of one. He's no democrat . . . no rangy western sheriff, no Rocky, no wistful private eye, no Henry Fonda-type honest lawyer. He's meant to be suave. But it is a democrat's idea of suavity. It boils down to ordering caviar and specifying Bollinger and knowing how he wants his Martini built. Any guy could be like Bond if he had enough money and was in a place something like . . . that other icon of the Sixties . . . a Playboy Club.

The latest Bond, Daniel Craig, has the smashing, gym-built body you'll find in any neighbourhood with high unemployment, and a small thin mouth which becomes touchingly indecisive when he has to change from his main facial expression (impassive) to his minor one (mirthless smile). He's very sexy, too. Just as Casino Royale presents a world where evil is parodied to the point where it becomes mere decor, so Craig as a supposed old Etonian is so authentically his workingclass self that he takes all the harm out of class superiority. That superiority was based on the old, World War Two idea that a British intelligence service staffed by wellborn amateur men attended by upperclass gels is the recipe for the finest kind of service . . . that like Judi Dench's intelligence service in the movie it was and is both brilliantly effective and the embodiment of cool. But if it is . . . and it is not . . . that would only prove that an intelligence service can go on moving even after its government head has been cut off. Last week a White House insider was quoted in the New York Times as saying, apropos George W Bush's reaction to Tony Blair's growing doubts and fears about the Iraq folly: "Nobody here takes any notice of Britain."

Irish Press 10 December 1966 SURROUNDED by Dublin's rush-hour traffic, a 76-yearold man would certainly have died last night but for the quick action of two schoolgirls. Up to his neck in the Grand Canal at Baggot Street Bridge, Patrick Philips stood for twenty minutes awaiting a rescue.

Paralysed by the icy waters, he could not shout for help.

Two 18-year old schoolgirls, Maureen Shudell, Pleasant St, South Circular Road, and Linda McEvoy, Pearse Brothers Park, Rathfarnham, walking home from St Mary's Convent, Haddington Road, saw a white object bobbing about in the canal. At first they thought it was a swan, but their curiosity was aroused and they went closer. They saw Mr Philips . . . his head barely showing above the water. Maureen, a bronze medal holder for life saving, rushed for assistance. Aided by a passer-by, the three dragged him to safety. The man, who lives in Roebuck Castle, Dundrum, under the care of the Little Sisters of the Poor, was walking along by the canal when he tripped and fell in.