IRELAND: Trial by Fire in Dublin

Until dashing Christopher Ewart-Biggs, 54, was posted as British Ambassador to Ireland last month, the Dublin embassy had been a quiet backwater where aging diplomats drifted into retirement. But Ewart-Biggs, a veteran diplomatic troubleshooter, had been hand-picked for the Dublin job by British Prime Minister James Callaghan to coordinate Anglo-Irish policy in the face of a surge of terrorism that has been spilling south into Ireland from the embattled British province of Ulster. The survivor of several brushes with violence, he wore a distinctive tinted monocle covering an eye lost at El Alamein in World War II and was...