ABSTRACT
The title of this talk may recall the subjects taught in the school attended by the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland: reeling and writhing and fainting in coils, but actually the first part (combing and curling) comes from quite a well-known passage in the treatise by the Greek critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Composition, and the second from Cicero, in De Oratore.
