- You can always tell the character of a place by the nicknames it has earned. Appropriately enough for the city that inspired The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Edinburgh has two contradictory - but complementary - ones.
- The Athens of the North, a name inspired by the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, is a city of high culture and lofty ideals, of art and literature, philosophy and science. It is here that each summer the world's biggest arts festival rises, phoenixlike, from the ashes of last year's rave reviews and broken box-office records to produce yet another string of superlatives. And it is here, beneath the Greek temples of Calton Hill - Edinburgh's acropolis - that the Scottish Parliament sits again after a 300-year absence.
- But Edinburgh is also Auld Reekie, an altogether earthier place that flicks an impudent finger at the pretensions of the literati. Auld Reekie is a city of loud, crowded pubs and decadent restaurants, late-night drinking and all-night parties, beer-fuelled poets and foul-mouthed comedians. It's the city that tempted Robert Louis Stevenson from his law lectures to explore the drinking dens and lurid street life of the 19th-century Old Town. And it's the city of Beltane, the resurrected pagan May Day festival where half-naked revellers dance in the flickering firelight of bonfires beneath the stony indifference of Calton Hill's pillared monuments.
- It's a town intimately entwined with its landscape, with buildings and monuments perched atop crags and overshadowed by cliffs - in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, 'a dream in masonry and living rock'.
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