
In the early 18th century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the...

How - in the 18th century - did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of just two long streets and 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and ours? So that Voltaire wrote with a dash of malice that today it is from Scotland that we...
