Cosima Liszt, daughter of the composer Franz Liszt and Marie d´Agoult, rushed into an unsuccessful marriage with the composer and conductor Hans von Bülow. She wrote articles and visited cultural highlights in Berlin. In Munich 1864 she engaged in the love affair with Richard Wagner and a year later the child Isolde was born. She married him in 1870 in order to have the birth of Siegfried legalised and asked Bülow for a divorce. Her meticulous diaries of her life with him are a vital biographical source, although in them she perpetuates the traditional narrative of the autonomous male genius. After his death she took over the direction of the Bayreuth Festspiele and developed a style committed to Wagner’s performance practice. She excelled in matters of gesture, fusing singing aesthetic, gesture, and word/music relationship.

The relational health perspective offers a different lens through which to view how our health is shaped and what the most productive avenues are for achieving long-term positive health outcomes. This book draws on empirical research into how social relationships affect health outcomes, with a focus on three specific health problems –obesity, opioid use disorder, and depression in older adults – and incorporates examples of the untapped potential of community resources, social networks, and varied partnerships.

Willpower is often understood as a muscle of the mind that we can learn to flex. The perennial philosophical problems of weakness of the will and freedom of the will. But as science reminds us, everything has a cause, and this includes our will. These conclusions accord well with our phenomenological experiences. Most of what we do is governed by habits. We act as we come to do what a certain situation calls for. As a result there can be no such thing as self-determination. We can never have power over ourselves. The historical overview focuses on the crisis of willpower at the turn of the twentieth century. Factory labor, standing to attention, and the mechanization of life resulted in neurasthenia and other mental afflictions. Dreams of daredevilry, colonialism, and war were ways to break free and restore freedom of movement. The illusion of national self-determination.