“Edinburgh has shed its decorum and become as raucous, filthy, drunken and commercialised as everywhere else. When people talk of the Festival they mean the Fringe – which this year consists of more than 30,000 performances of 2,000 shows – leaving the ‘official’ or ‘International’ programme of high culture as isolated and marginal as an atoll in the Pacific. The Fringe may be supremely democratic, a uniquely free market. Yet it is also a monster devouring its own children.”