This book studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or to power, and lack of will. It surveys many texts -- from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot and D H Lawrence -- in order to analyse the history of its different concepts: rational/irrational drive, sexual appetite, or just testamentary, so asserting identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music...