Book excerpt: On Reading the Will studies the will, will-power and wilfulness, the will to death or the will to power, as well as lack of will. It surveys many texts - from Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence - in order to analyse the history of its different meanings: whether these imply rational or irrational drives, or the sexual appetite, or the testamentary will. This last is a particularly interesting form of the will, in that it asserts the desire to control, and to have an identity beyond death. Drawing on philosophies of the will in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the book studies music as the embodied will in Wagner and Verdi. Considering the law and its prohibitions as a form of the will, it sees how these produce a perverse will. Drawing on Freud and Lacan it studies interrelationships between the law which prohibits and the desire which wills, how desire creates the law, and the law desire. What stands out is that the authors studied are fascinated by the will as unknowable and irresistible, as rational and countermanding rationality, as divided and imperious. Chapters include how wills motivate plots in Shakespeare and the Victorian novel. Discussion of opera and Nietzsche focuses on the will as an unconscious force.--