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 Fontainezolm.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Hello. Today on Open Book, we're looking at a time of crisis and creativity, a period full of civil unrest and economic instability, which followed a global pandemic and a messy,

inconclusive war.

But it's also an era that ushered in a new generation that questioned the

assumptions of the past, thought of new ways of living and new forms of expression.

Women challenged society's expectations in radical ways. Black artists and intellectuals

established their own creative canon in order to question social injustice. I am of course talking about the 20s,

the so-called roaring 20s, but also the 2020s, and that's exactly the point of this special

edition of Open Book, where we'll be looking at the two decades side-by-side 100 years apart.

We'll be hearing from contemporary writers seeking, in the words of Ezra Pound,

to make it new. The first of these is Alison McLeod, author of The Book Alonglisted Unexploded.

A latest book, Tenderness, is named after the original title of Lady Chattelie's lover by D.H. Lawrence,

the radical 1928 book, which forms the backdrop in multiple ways to this

...