Edinburgh Festival
How Damien Hirst ruined Devon
There are few better locations to resist la rentrée than the wilds of Exmoor. The late August heather and gorse.…
A tragicomic lecture about Gold at Edinburgh Festival
A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked…
Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?
This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set —…
No whisky for breakfast? But this is Scotland!
I begin my 87-day reading tour of the US, UK and Canada on a BA flight that will take me…
Rory Bremner: Why comedians are getting political
The brilliant Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell describes doing stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe as ‘exams for clowns’, and even though…
Ayesha Hazarika’s Edinburgh diary: The most offensive thing about Boris’s burka joke? It wasn’t original
Taking my new stand-up show Girl on Girl to the Edinburgh festival this year and playing at the prestigious venue…
London calling
What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know…
Val McDermid’s Diary: Facing 3,000 choices at the Edinburgh festival
There are many good reasons for being in Edinburgh in August, when the population doubles and nobody looks twice if…
Enough ‘themes’ at festivals
One might have expected the streets of Edinburgh, especially at festival time, to bear some evidence of the political struggle…
Mariinsky’s Les Troyens — a bad night for Berlioz and Edinburgh
I wonder whether grand opéra really takes war as seriously as this year’s Edinburgh Festival wanted it to. These vast…
Andrew Marr’s diary: Seeing shadows of Syria in Limousin’s ghost village
No, no, no, you don’t want a house abroad — the paperwork, the taxes, the piping, the cost of the…
Alex Salmond has already lost — if the Edinburgh Festival is anything to go by
Lloyd Evans tours the Edinburgh Festival in search of clues about the outcome of the referendum
An innocent graduate of Operation Yewtree, Jim Davidson, dazzles in Edinburgh
Let’s start with a nightmare. Wendy Wason, an Edinburgh comedienne, travelled to LA last year accompanied by her husband, who…
The best of the Edinburgh Fringe
Rain whimpers from Edinburgh’s skies. The sodden tourists look like aliens in their steamed-up ponchos as they scurry and rustle…
3,000 acts and no quality control – why the Edinburgh Fringe is the greatest (and patchiest) arts festival in the world
And they’re off. The mighty caravan of romantic desperadoes, radical egoists, stadium wannabes, struggling superstars and vanity crackheads is on…
Kirsty Wark’s diary: On the Caledonian sleeper, the new Donna Tartt, and a week of Edinburgh shows
There isn’t a Scottish politician in living memory who hasn’t been on the Caledonian Sleeper. I always imagined Donald Dewar…
