An Edinburgh August

Iain McWhirter at The Guardian reminds one why Edinburgh is perhaps the world’s best city every August:

Now, here’s a cultural success story of truly epic proportions. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe alone has sold 1.7m tickets this year – that’s more than twice the number sold by the Manchester Commonwealth Games. It does this every year. And the official Edinburgh International Festival hasn’t even finished yet, so its figures are still to come. The Edinburgh Book Festival has attracted 200,000 to its Charlotte Square tent city, which means that the Edinburgh culture-fest’s final score will be well over 2 million… This is an astonishing achievement and gives the lie to those who claim that people aren’t interested in drama, literature, music and physical theatre anymore… And the point of it is that these “cultural Olympics” as the first minister, Alex Salmond, calls them, happen largely spontaneously and with very little public funding.