Non-EU nations in Europe are an increasingly rare breed. Norwegians twice rejected membership in referenda which saw the grassroots triumph over the political establishment, rejecting the advice of governments and mass media. It is now ten years since they last said No. What has it meant for the country? Do Norwegians feel they have suffered […]
This is an extremely simple dish; to prepare it, virtually nobody in Italy follows a recipe. I want to include it in this issue of Three Monkeys Online as a suggestion to all those who have not much time on their hands to shop for groceries or to cook, were not endowed with a natural […]
My friend Marisa, who is a dietician and from Barcelona, always says that this is the perfect recipe for a light spring or summer dinner. The main ingredients are white beans (she uses fesols de Santa Pau, which correspond roughly to cannellini beans) and bacalao (or else bacallà, or baccalà, i.e. dried and salted codfish, […]
For most people, the idea of reading James Joyce’s Ulysses is an intimidating prospect. Film director, Sean Walsh, has gone one step further in adapting it to a two-hour movie. Bloom takes Joyce’s tome and converts it into a largely conventional drama, concentrating on the human aspects of the central characters’ life journeys, which are […]
“We have to ask why we're surprised when there's violence associated with football? It's been an arena for largely ritualised patterns of expressions of aggression since time immemorial and you can go back even further: to classical history, to accounts of the circus factions of the fans of chariot racing in Rome and later on […]
Euro 2004 has, at last, begun, and has already thrown up a few surprises. Alex Bellos is the author of Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury), and for five years, was the South America correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer. Mark Harkin spoke to him about the current football-fest. Since the European Championships […]
So I went to Romania, to attend a conference. I didn’t see one single vampire or the House of the People. I didn’t go to the centre of Bucharest either, to hide from reality in a modern hotel room. Instead, I was whisked away over the bleak Wallachian plains up to the Transylvanian mountains. What […]
Sage Francis is full of contradictions – the introspective hip-hop artist (as shown on his album Personal Journals) coupled with off beat sense of humour, and outspoken politics. He's won Poetry competitions, and hip-hop slams. He's toured America independently, and sold records by the bucketload without any major label support. He's played with live bands, […]
Tod A., bassist and singer/songwriter of Firewater is hearing voices – his own – as a transatlantic echo bounces back his comments over the phone line. “Oh man, that's great, I get to hear how stupid I sound”. It's typical of the conversation that we have over the next half an hour, that veers between […]