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Explore the history of the This House characters here

Explore the timeline for This House.

“It’s beyond language.” So speaks ex-clergyman Christopher Roulston in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. For McGuinness, the limitations of language are both restriction and liberation, something to be railed against as much as it is to be manipulated.

In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler identifies an unsettling problem at the heart of the idea of feminism. Feminism, she argues, imagines the idea of ‘women’ as a common identity that all women share and that unites them all. But where does our idea of what ‘women’ are come from?

Sarah Grochala explores a brief history of feminism from Proto-Feminism to Third Wave Feminism.

“The house has grown cold, the province has grown lonely…The temple of the Lord is ransacked…Dance in this deserted temple of the Lord.”

As the whistle blew in Thiepval wood at 7:30 am on 1st July 1916, the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division began their march in to no-man’s land under a hail of German bullets. Today, their ghosts are still marching on banners and on gable walls throughout Northern Ireland.

2016 has been a year of what feels like almost constant commemoration in Ireland as the centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916 is marked in lectures, art exhibitions, television programmes and parades. But we are also in the middle of commemorating the Great War, a war that for a very long time in post-independence Ireland, was a subject of embarrassment rather than remembrance in what the historian R. F. Foster calls “a policy of intentional amnesia”.

Our histories live and thrive in the gaps between image and reality. We look to and pick at the images in search of tangible, plausible and, at times, reassuring realities.

In AA meetings, we are urged to “look for the similarities not the differences”. Watching People, Places, Things, I didn’t need to look hard, the parallels between my own life and the story onstage were obvious

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.