The last words of the actor Edmund Kean are alleged to have been “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” He passed away (with relative ease) in 1833, more than a century before the outbreak of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One can only envy his good fortune and wonder what he’d make of the mayhem that unfolds every August in Scotland’s capital.

Independent columnist Terence Blacker makes his Edinburgh Festival debut this week with a show of storytelling and songs. He reveals the pain and pleasure of creating a work for the stage rather than the page

Police want to trace the mother of a baby whose remains were found on a path near a cemetery.

Dance Odyssey is a new scheme whereby you can see a clutch of performances, films or talks on one ticket. Worth a look is Christopher Hampson's Rite of Spring (Festival Theatre, eif.co.uk, 18 Aug), and Scottish Ballet's world premiere of a work by king of speed, Édouard Lock (16 Aug).

This year's Edinburgh festival is a good place to start

Gordon had his larynx removed during surgery to treat throat cancer

The 52-year-old will be ordained as Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh in September

Lawrie Reilly was among the most prolific international marksmen in the history of Scottish football, with a strike-rate for his country superior to that of both Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish and a gilded Wembley tally of five goals against England in as many games At club level, too, the diminutive post-war predator was a paragon, the spearhead of Hibernian's "Famous Five" forward line, the swashbuckling quintet which fired the Easter Road side to consecutive titles in the early 1950s and which earned widespread approbation as the most entertaining attack the League has known.

Fire performer, stilt-walker, rigger and, foremost an aerialist renowned for the art of counterweighting – the process of lifting people or objects by using a pulley system or their body weight – Barnz Munn wants to make everything fly, from his girlfriend Shaena, to Chinese poles and drum kits. “We use counterweighting for most of the lifting so when one person goes up, someone else comes down,” explains Munn, artistic director of nine-strong circus company Pirates of the Carabina,whose show Flown was first commissioned to headline the Big Top tent at Glastonbury two years ago. “It's become our trademark and we fly the equipment as well as the people.”

R&A chief executive Peter Dawson defended Muirfield's men-only policy ahead of British Open

It will take a champion of champions to join the list of greats at one of the great courses

Good radio comedy could not have sounded less funny on television, nor canned laughter more ironic. Something was surely lost in translation in the BBC's transposition of the Sony Radio Academy-award-winning show Count Arthur Strong into prime-time TV.

The price of a check-up at the dentists can vary by as much as 200 per cent depending on where you live in the country.

Former US president offers advice to help both sides of the Scottish independence debate get along