As part of Radio 3's Music on the Brink, Free Thinking takes the cultural temperature of Paris, Berlin, London, St Petersburg and Vienna in the years leading up to the First World War. The novelist AS Byatt, the film expert Neil Brand and the cultural historians Alexandra Harris and Philipp Blom have chosen artworks and artefacts from the period and will use them to explore, with Anne McElvoy, the ideas and spirit of the European capital cities on the brink of World War 1.