Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs: The Magic Cutlass review – timber-shivering fun
This musical for over-threes adapted from the eponymous picturebooks comes with delightful puppets and lashings of puns
Edinburgh arts festivals lobby for urgent visa reforms
Umbrella body meets minister to discuss concerns over limits on artists entering UK
The Guardian view on the Edinburgh festivals: bigger is not always better
Editorial: Edinburgh in August plays host to an extraordinary wealth of culture and art. But it’s the quality of the experience that counts for both visitors and residents, not the number of events
The End of Eddy review – a televisual glimpse into small-town homophobia
Stewart Laing sensitively takes Édouard Louis’s groundbreaking coming-of-age story from page to stage
UK festival directors demand end to ‘overly complex’ visa process
Leading figures from arts, music and culture call for government reforms
Fiction is a way of telling the truth – Ali Smith in Edinburgh
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, interviews the experimental novelist at book festival event
How to Be Both review – Ali Smith’s dazzling novel hits the stage
An experiment in presenting fiction beyond panel discussion or onstage interview pays off handsomely
Home Office refuses visas for authors invited to Edinburgh book festival
Festival director Nick Barley says ‘humiliating’ application process will deter writers and damage cultural life in UK
‘A thoroughly entertaining failure’: the return of Muriel Spark’s mega-flop
Her savage send-up of the London intelligentsia was panned by critics. But could Doctors of Philosophy now be about to hit its prime?
A desire for Duras: Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch on the writer’s erotic, existential mystery
Part philosophical meditation, part fantasy, Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella La Maladie de la Mort comes to the stage in a hi-tech Edinburgh festival show
Shilpa Gupta: the artist bringing silenced poets back to life
For centuries, poets have been jailed or killed for speaking out against injustice – but they speak again an eerie sound installation at Edinburgh art festival
The End of Eddy: how Édouard Louis made the personal political
Pamela Carter recognised aspects of her own life in Louis’s book about growing up determined to escape his French village. Now she’s bringing his story to the stage
Half a Booker dozen at the Edinburgh book festival
Sebastian Barry, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster and Ali Smith – it was smiles all round when organisers realised they had invited six of the Booker longlist
Irvine Welsh: ‘You see the white male rage of Begbie in the culture today’
The Trainspotting author, 58, on the destruction of masculinity, loving Iggy Pop and the terror of hangovers
The 10 best things to do this week: Against, Edinburgh book festival and Grizzly Bear
Ben Whishaw stars in a post-truth play at the Almeida in London, the Scottish literary event celebrates 70 years and the US rockers unveil a new album