Next year Brian McMaster, the longest-serving director of the Edinburgh Festival, is stepping down. “The hunt for a new boss has started a bit late. The Festival Council’s search party – chaired by Edinburgh’s Lord Provost and made up of eight people whose experience and credentials on the international cutting edge of artistic trends seems worryingly minimal – must be losing sleep over the timetable. An appointment made next May with the successful candidate taking up the post less than a year ahead of his or her first festival isn’t going to secure those prize artists with diaries filled five years ahead. And the unthinking choice of an internal appointment or of any inadequately experienced local hopefuls isn’t the solution.”