Sublime

Gervase Markham, writing in the early seventeenth century, said that one sort of wheat above all others was prized for thatching, a type that he called ‘whole straw wheat’. Straw of this type was not hollow but full of pith, and its yield of grain was high, although the flour did not produce the whitest or best bread. You might therefore expect tha

1920s potboiler novelist Edgar Wallace’s notorious ‘Plot Wheel’: an actual device that spun round to reveal handy writing prompts such as ‘a fortuitous arrival’ or ‘Heroine declares her love’.