On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for

Lucan. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fontunzelman. This is

the Lucan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, we're exploring Belfast this week by way of two new novels set at different moments of 20th century conflict.

As the war in Ukraine continues, we consider the situation faced by dissident writers from Russia,

and we look at the changing status of a category of character more often than not mocked and pitied in fiction, the spinster.

They were the leftover jigsaw pieces,

their untidy presence making the characters around them feel uncomfortable.

When we mention the Blitz, the first thought many of us have is of London, Liverpool or Glasgow,

forgetting the terrible devastation suffered by the docks and residential areas of Belfast in 1941.

Lucy Caldwell's new novel, These Days, tells the story of two sisters whose lives are transformed forever by four nights of bombing.

Audrey is engaged to be married to a promising young doctor, while Emma is in a passionate relationship with another woman.

Both stay in the city, while thousands of others flee.

Driving back from North Belfast, they saw the exodus.

Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, bath chairs, even children's bogey carts.

Anything with wheels had been pressed into service, loaded with human and material flotsam,

leaving the city. The rag and bone men, the coke man,

the oldfellas with their ice cream trikes, the woman that sells arglass herrings door to door

from the paniers in the back of her donkey, all of them seem to have taken to the roads,

...