The Edinburgh Festival is looking for a new director, but the search has been a lazy one so far. “Edinburgh stands out as the last bastion, the one place and time when Scotland can bask in the world’s attention and imagine itself briefly to be Athens. The festival is not what it was, the last couple of years under Brian McMaster featuring fewer world-class orchestras and opera companies and less incisive theatre; but these shortcomings have been masked by the vitality of peripheral festivals for books, film and television and, of course, the anarchic fringe.”