Edinburgh is a Unesco 'City of Literature' - for an excellent reason

The Writers' Museum proves an effective springboard for learning about the varied backgrounds, lives and skills of Scott, Burns and Stevenson

Irish comedian and actor Dylan Moran has lived in Edinburgh since 1999, choosing it over London where you are forced to live in a “paper cup at the bottom of somebody else’s garden in Balham”. I watched him perform his latest special, Dr Cosmos, with all its surreal and poetic flourishes at a theatre in the British capital, where I had, of course, been staying in student accommodation roughly the size of an industrial elevator. It prompted me that very weekend to board a train to the Scottish metropolis, which in no small way had inspired Moran’s superlative 2000 sitcom,