Into The Arena can be purchased at all major British bookshops or from Amazon UK at a discount by clicking here (in paperback, eBook or audiobook.) In the US, it can be purchased from Amazon in all these formats by clicking here. In Canada here. In Australia here. In India here. In Singapore and South East Asia here. It also available from iTunes, via its recommendation by Condé Nast’s GQ magazine here.

Shortlisted for

“Most inspiring sports book for Christmas” Sunday Times 2011
“Sports Books for Christmas” Sunday Telegraph 2011
“Best summer holiday reads” Sunday Telegraph 2011
“Essential summer reading” Sunday Times 2011

“Complex and ambitious. Compelling and lyrical.”
Mail on Sunday *****
“An engrossing introduction to Spain’s ‘great feast of art and danger’…brilliantly capturing a fascinating, intoxicating culture.”
Sunday Times
“A compelling read, unusual for its genre, exalting the bullfight as pure theatre.”
Sunday Telegraph
“An informed piece of work on a subject about which we are all expected to have a view.”
Daily Mail
“Thrilling. An engrossing introduction to bullfighting.”
Financial Times
“Fantastic. A fascinating insight into a world we know little about but are quick to judge.”
Metro

“An informative and breathtaking volume of gonzo journalism”
The Herald (Scotland)
“Intoxicating. Pulses with the writer’s love of the world and the people he has found himself among.”
The Australian (Australia)
“A thoughtful, well-researched and deeply felt investigation… vivid evocations of men who risk their lives in a beautiful, vulgar battle with the bulls.”
The Prague Post (Czech Republic)

“An entertaining account seeks a demonstration of the values which distinguish bullfighting from butchery.”
The Spectator
“Particularly good. Transposes spectacle into words with great success, conveying the drama with eloquence and precision.”
Literary Review
“An engaging adventure story of a young man pursuing a dream with determination and courage.”
The Times Literary Supplement

“To his credit, Fiske-Harrison acknowledges the morally questionable nature of the bullfight. And the book contains interesting explorations of concepts such as fear, bravery and drive.”
League Against Cruel Sports
“A larger than life character. A hugely enjoyable and easy read. Moving and instructive.”
Club Taurino of London
“One of the most engaging books on the Bulls I have ever read. One feels every failure, every success, every thrill.”
Taurine Bibliophiles of America

(for full reviews, see next post)

From the front cover:

A hero from another age, a fearless Englishman touched by madness. This endeavour owes as much to Captain Oates as to Ernest Hemingway, as much to Flashman as to Don Quixote.
Giles Coren, columnist for The Times

Arguably the most engaging study of bullfighting by an English speaker since Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. His willingness to get his hands dirty, and his eye for detail, make this a compelling read for anyone interested in Spain’s ‘national fiesta’. Controversial, thought-provoking and highly recommended.
Jason Webster, author of Duende: A Journey In Seach Of Flamenco

Bold, provocative and morally searching, Fiske-Harrison writes about the bizarre and arrogant world of bullfighting with passion, deep knowledge, and readiness to risk his own neck in the arena. His descriptions lucidly capture the near indescribable thrills of the corrida.
Michael Jacobs, author of Factory Of Light: Life In An Andalucian Village

Fiske-Harrison, red and white blazer right, runs with the bulls in Pamplona (Photo: Reuters)

From the back cover:

Alexander Fiske-Harrison spent a season studying and travelling with the matadors and breeders of famous “fighting bulls” of Spain (and France and Portugal. ) He ran with the bulls in Pamplona and found himself invited to join his new friends in the ring with 500lb training cows. This developed into a personal quest to understand the bullfight at its deepest levels, and he entered into months of damaging and dangerous training with one of the greatest matadors of all, Eduardo Dávila Miura, to prepare himself to experience the bullfight in its true essence: that of man against bull in a life or death struggle from which only one can emerge alive.

Fiske-Harrison with a three-year old, 330kg fighting bull (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

Excerpt from Chapter 2: Meeting The Bull:

“The sensation of being the focus of such fury is a unique one. I stopped halfway along the wall, slowly turned, put my hands on the safety-rail and looked down at the explosive paranoia of horn and muscle less than five feet away from me. I moved the little finger of my left hand and his head flicked towards it. Then I moved the little finger on my right, and his head shot towards that. I kept my movement-level low, trying to gauge it so that I kept his attention but didn’t exceed whatever psychological tipping point existed within that bovine brain. My overwhelming feeling at that moment was of smiling and thinking, perversely you may say, that this was an experience I would like to take further. However, it was enough for a first meeting with a bull.”

From inside the cover:

“The bullfighter-philosopher.”
John-Paul Flintoff in The Times.

“Whether or not the artistic quality of the bullfight outweighs the moral question of the animals’ suffering is something that each person must decide for themselves – as they must decide whether the taste of a steak justifies the death of a cow. But if we ignore the possibility that one does outweigh the other, we fall foul of the charge of self-deceit and incoherence in our dealings with animals.”
Alexander Fiske-Harrison (writing in Prospect magazine in 2008)

“It is one of the best pieces ever written on the subject. An almost literally terrific piece of work.”
Frederic Raphael (on Fiske-Harrison’s 2008 essay).

Alexander Fiske-Harrison (personal website here) was born in 1976 and is an English writer and actor. He studied biology and then philosophy at the universities of Oxford and London and trained in acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York. He has written for The Times, Financial Times, The TLS and Prospect magazine. He wrote, and acted in, The Pendulum which debuted in London’s West End in 2008.

The New York Times: Raphael Minder, March 1st, 2012

Bullfighter’s Return Stuns a Hardened Sport

Laura Leon for The International Herald Tribune

Although Fiske-Harrison did not contribute in words to The New York Times’cover story below (which ran with similar prominence in the International Herald Tribune)  he was with Juan José Padilla at the time and arranged the interview, (having met Raphael Minder for the NYT-IHT article further on.) Padilla is not only the first matador Fiske-Harrison met for Into The Arena, but also accompanied and mentored him in his forays into the ring.

“I’m somebody who has always accepted the risks of my profession, as well as its rewards,” said Mr. Padilla on his decision to return to bullfighting.

MADRID — Five months after surviving a horrifying goring, Juan José Padilla, one of Spain’s leading bullfighters, wears a patch over his left eye and cannot chew any food, even after a series of surgeries to reconstruct part of his face.

But his recovery is startling for a man who was last seen in images shown around the world stumbling out of a bullring, holding his bloodied face and screaming, “I can’t see!” as his shocked fans looked on.

Laura Leon for the International Herald Tribune

Mr. Padilla will take a further step on Sunday, when he will re-enter the ring in the western town of Olivenza, making a comeback at a speed that has stunned the rest of the bullfighting profession.“Sunday will feel like a dream come true, after some very hard months, and I’m fully aware that nobody thought I would be back now,” he said.

Last Oct. 7, Mr. Padilla was gored after slipping on the sand of Saragossa’s bullring. The bull’s horn pierced the fighter’s lower jaw and came out through his left eye socket.

Since his hospitalization, Mr. Padilla says he has spent his time between medical visits training hard, adding that he had killed as many as 10 bulls on private farms in preparation for his return.

Still, fighting with an eye patch will be a challenge at this level of bullfighting, making it particularly dangerous for Mr. Padilla whenever the bull brushes past him on his blind left side.

Despite his injuries, Mr. Padilla, 38, said that he had been encouraged by his wife and two children, although he acknowledged that his comeback did create “some divisions” within his family.

“My parents couldn’t understand why I would want to return,” he said.

Mr. Padilla’s decision comes amid an intense debate in Spain over bullfighting, attacked as a barbaric ritual by animal rights activists but defended by its supporters as a central component of Spanish culture.

His goring, which followed another accident a year before when Julio Aparicio was pierced through the throat, has done little to alter the debate. Mr. Aparicio has also returned to the ring, and Mr. Padilla insisted that his comeback was not about raising the general level of sympathy and admiration for bullfighters.

Mr. Padilla had been wounded before, notably to the neck in 2001 during a fight in Pamplona — although that injury took less than a month to heal. This time, the left side of his face had to be reconstructed with titanium plates and mesh.

“I’m somebody who has always accepted the risks of my profession, as well as its rewards,” he said.

While matadors like Mr. Padilla have been unbending in their commitment to bullfighting, the larger fortunes of the profession have undergone turmoil in the last several years.

Since 2007 and the start of the financial crisis, bullfighting has come under pressure in Spain because of public subsidy cuts, slashing the number of fights by more than a third. Catalonia stopped bullfighting in September, after its regional Parliament voted to ban it.

But in November, the conservative Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, returned to power after almost eight years of Socialist government. Mr. Rajoy is himself an aficionado of the sport and his party has long spearheaded efforts to enshrine bullfighting in the national cultural patrimony.

As evidence of the political swing, Spain’s national television announced last month that it would again show bullfights, after abandoning its coverage in 2006 under the Socialist administration.

“I’m here to promote bullfighting and not to get involved in politics,” Mr. Padilla said, “but it’s obviously good to have a government that defends our interests.”

 

Daily Telegraph: Alexander Fiske-Harrison, November 25th, 2011

To the Spanish bullfighting is much more than a sport

A life and death matter: Alexander Fiske-Harrison (far right) running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain (Photo: Reuters /Joseba Etxaburu)

When my publisher told me that my book had been longlisted for a sports writing prize sponsored by William Hill – the Bookie Prize as it is known – I smiled cynically. The announcement came less than a week after Catalonia banned bullfighting and the Barcelona bullring hosted its last ever fight. This was reported here as “Bullfighting Dies In Spain” – even though of the thousand bullfights a year, less than a dozen were held in Barcelona.

The same applies to the argument that killing for food is not the same as killing for entertainment. We eat meat because we like the taste – ie to entertain our palates.

As for the argument that watching a living creature’s death is somehow a sin: is anyone seriously claiming the astonishing success of the BBC’s Natural History Unit is because we all want to learn a little more biology rather than replicate the thrills of the Circus Maximus?

It was not long before I started to see the beauty of toreo – bullfighting as a word does not exist in Spanish, and in English comes from our artless, riskless and brutal hobby of bull-baiting. It is for beauty that the real aficionados attend the corrida, not for pomp, not for thrill and certainly not for blood. In my adopted city of Seville the bullring is silent until beauty appears. This is usually in the final and most famous of the three acts of the fight, the “Third of Death”, in which the matador passes the bull with a red cape, as closely and as elegantly as he can. The only chant you will hear is that of “olé” at each pass.

Don’t take my word for this. Here is what Orson Welles had to say on the matter: “What is the essence of this art? That the man carry himself with grace and that he move the bull slowly and with a certain majesty. That is, he must allow the inherent quality of the bull to manifest itself.”

The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of the “slow, sad fury of a perfect bullfight,” comparing it to Othello in its dark majesty and gravity.

In Spain, I became friends with some of the matadors, like the larger than life figure of Juan José Padilla, who fought the most dangerous bulls of all, the Miuras. This breed has killed more matadors than any other. Today, Padilla is in hospital, a bull having taken away the sight in his left eye, and paralysed that side of his face, in a goring so gruesome the image circulated round the world.

Another friend who stills fights is Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, grandson of the great Antonio Ordóñez about whom Hemingway wrote the book, The Dangerous Summer, and at whose house Welles’s ashes are interred. Cayetano’s father, Paquirri, had a less fortunate career; he was killed by a bull in 1984.

It was these two who encouraged me to venture into the ring so I could write about their world with an understanding that transcended the appreciation of the beauty. Instead of just watching, I came to know the tension, the fear and the injuries suffered by these artists.

Looking at the other books on the shortlist – a young rugby player tragically paralysed, a goalkeeper driven to suicide by depression – one can see there is much in common with the troubled life of toreros.

However, bullfighting is the only art form that both represents something and is that thing at the same time: the matador’s elegant immobility in the face of the bull not only represents man’s defiance of death, it is a man defying death (and there are women who do it too, such as the rising star Conchi Rios).

Love it or hate it, bullfighting is not a sport. To devotees and opponents alike, it is much more important than that.

*Into the Arena (Profile) is available from Telegraph Books at £15.99.*The William Hill Sports Book of the Year is announced on Monday November 28.

The New York Times – International Herald Tribune: Raphael Minder, September 25th, 2011

In Catalonia, a Last Day of Bullfighting

Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

Barcelona’s bullring was filled to capacity for the city’s final day of bullfighting Sunday

The Catalonia region of Spain bade farewell to bullfighting on Sunday with a corrida in Barcelona’s Monumental bullring featuring José Tomás, probably the country’s most popular matador.

After putting to death their respective bulls in front of a sell-out crowd in the 20,000-seat arena, Mr Tomás, along with another bullfighter Serafín Marín, were carried shoulder high from the ring into the streets by ecstatic fans. Others, meanwhile, invaded the ring to gather some of its sand as a souvenir of the final fight, which follows a vote last year by the Catalan regional Parliament to ban bullfighting

But such scenes of enthusiasm for bullfighting are no longer the norm these days in Spain. Not only have animal rights activists increased pressure to outlaw the fights — as was the case in Catalonia — but bullfighting is also confronting a financial crisis that has forced public subsidy cuts to local venues that once relied on them.

The number of bullfights held in Spain has fallen by just over a third since the onset of the financial crisis — to 1,724 last year from 2,622 in 2007, according to government data. For the month of August alone, the drop over the same period was 50 percent, underlining the extent to which smaller, debt-saddled towns have abandoned the bullfighting spectacle that was long the highlight of their summer festivities but that they can no longer afford.

The woes of the bullfighting business have also been acutely felt in the countryside, where bull breeders are enduring the same boom-and-bust situation that has unfolded in Spain’s property sector. In fact, many of the newcomers to bull breeding are also construction entrepreneurs, who often bought farming land for its gentrified status.

“The number of farms grew in an uncontrolled manner,” said Carlos Núñez, president of the Unión de Criadores de Toros de Lidia an association that represents 367 bull breeders across Spain. The resulting oversupply means that, if not close to bankruptcy, “many of them are now up for sale,” he said.

Leopoldo de la Maza, who has a farm near Morón de la Frontera, in Andalusia, forecast that “next year will be for sure as hard as this year, if not worse, because we already have to absorb with this year’s excess supply” of bulls. He added: “A lot of bulls will just have to stay out on the field, which in economic terms is a disaster.”

A four-year-old bull sent to the slaughterhouse earned a breeder about 450 euros, or $605, he said, instead of at least €6,000 if the bull met its death in Madrid or another major bull ring.

Another leading Andalusian breeder, who spoke only on condition of anonymity saying he did not want the attention from other breeders, suggested that Spain follow Portugal’s example in order to ease public concerns about animal cruelty. In Portugal, the bull is killed after the corrida — out of spectators’ sight — rather than fought to death in the ring.

“We need to change before this crisis wipes us out and modern society imposes in any case change upon us,” he said.

However important traditions, he added, the sector has reformed before, notably in the 1920s when horses were provided with protective gear to prevent a goring. “People got sick of seeing horses agonize and we’re here to show spectators what they actually want to see,” the breeder said.

The decision by Catalan lawmakers to ban bullfighting was also part of a nationalist push there to separate the region from Spain. However, the Catalan ban has allowed activists to intensify their campaign against killing bulls — also outside the ring. This month, protesters gathered in central Madrid to condemn an annual feast held in the town of Tordesillas, during which the bull is speared to death.

Traditional bullfighting, meanwhile, has also come under pressure outside Spain. In May, Ecuadoreans voted in a referendum to forbid killing bulls in the ring, as part of a wider initiative by President Rafael Correa to clamp down on activities involving cruelty to animals.

Still, many fighters condemn such political interference in an essential part of the cultural patrimony. “We should make the fight as attractive as possible, probably raise the rhythm, but not abandon respect for our traditions and roots,” said Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, a fourth-generation bullfighter, who rejected a recent offer to fight in Quito following the Ecuadorian vote.

Instead, “much can be done to develop our narrow and antiquated image,” he added, since “the advertising potential of bullfighting is enormous.”

Mr. Rivera is well-placed to know: he is also a model who has been featured in ad campaigns for Giorgio Armani and Loewe.

Meanwhile, a key argument voiced by breeders — that vast pastures help maintain farming and the countryside unspoilt — has been turned against them by some lawmakers in the European Parliament, who oppose channeling European Union farm subsidies toward sustaining a practice that is forbidden in several E.U. member states.

“It’s really hard to justify taxing an anti-bullfighting country like the U.K. so as to subsidize the raising of fighting bulls in Spain, which is what happens in the E.U. and should probably be stopped — and I say that as a bullfighter,” said Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a British aficionado who is a qualified torero as well as author of a book on bullfighting.

In fact, however, the political headwinds that have recently battered bullfighting could ease within Spain after a general election Nov. 20.

Opinion polls indicate the center-right Popular Party will return to power, after eight years of Socialist government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The Popular Party has challenged the Catalan ban in court, while also spearheading efforts to make bullfighting part of the national cultural patrimony, akin to its status in France. Cultural activities in Spain also benefit from lower value-added taxation — 8 percent compared to the 18 percent that has been applied to bullfighting events.

Furthermore, a government change could pave the way for the return of bullfighting on national television, according to Rubén Amón, a writer who has also acted as spokesman for a group of leading bullfighters. National television coverage was abandoned in 2006, during Mr. Zapatero’s first term in office, largely due to commercial reasons in order to focus instead on bidding for more popular events such as soccer matches. Still, the state-controlled broadcaster, RTVE, enshrined the ban last January, arguing that showing bullfights risked exposing children to violence against animals.

‘‘I don’t want bullfighting so closely linked to politics, but there’s no doubt that Popular Party’s return would be great news,’’ Mr. Amón said. ‘‘It will restore some balance to a society that has become more horrified by the death of an animal than a woman.’’

Evening Standard: Londoner’s Diary, October 24th, 2011

It’s wolf v bull as philosophers bare their teeth

Warring in blogland: Mark Rowlands and Alexander Fiske-Harrison

It’s the latest literary spat. Mark Rowlands, a British philosophy professor who spent a decade living with a wolf, gave a savage review to Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s book Into The Arena on the art of the matador in the Times Literary Supplement in September. Now Fiske-Harrison is as wounded as a bull lanced by a picador — and the men are locked in a battle of letters and blog posts against each other. Fiske-Harrison’s complaint is that Rowlands, who concerns himself with animal welfare, would be naturally indisposed to his love of bull-fighting, not to mention that Fiske-Harrison has previously given him a bad review. “Mark Rowlands is a proponent of vegetarianism and once tried to make his pet wolf into one, as described in The Philosopher and the Wolf,” says Fiske-Harrison.Professor Rowlands, who teaches at the University of Miami, had described Fiske-Harrison’s writing as being infected with “vainglory” and “startling arrogance” in his love of bull-fighting.The red rag in this feud was first waved two years when Fiske-Harrison reviewed Mark Rowlands’s wolf book for Prospect magazine. “If you combine misanthropy and lycophilia,” he wrote, “the resulting hybrid, lycanthropy, is indeed interesting but philosophically quite sterile.” Over to Rowlands. “I felt rather guilty that I was dispensing such a negative review,” he tells me. “I did, of course, inform the TLS of the fact that he had previously reviewed a book of mine. I resent the suggestion that my negative review was the result of personal animus … [it] was the result of the book not being very good.” Rowlands has also called Fiske-Harrison “thin-skinned”. The blog argument now runs to several thousands words, with still no victor in sight.

See the  ‘The TLS: A dispute of animal rights’ page here.

 

The Times: Giles Coren, December 26th, 2010

From Hemingway onwards, writers and travellers have been drawn to the drama and romance of the bullfight. Giles Coren is no exception, so when he was contacted out of the blue by the younger brother of his dead best friend, now training to be a matador in Spain, Giles was intrigued. Here he describes his journey into a unique culture of noblemen, peasants and swindlers, all driven by deadly serious dreams of death and glory

I am in a bullring. Not in the seats, in the ring. On the sand. From the relative safety of a wooden barrier with a small room behind it, built into the stone wall, I have seen four vaquillas, young cows, “caped” by one of Spain’s most famous matadors, the son of the first post-Franco prime minister of Spain, Adolfo Suárez Illana, and by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, the younger brother of my best friend at school, who died in an accident the year we left, three months before his 19th birthday.

As Xander walks off from working with his animal, I scuttle from my hiding place and bolt across the hot sand to another, flimsier fence, behind which is my photographer, Nicolás Haro, to see if he got the shots we need.

I feel exposed, out on the sand. The red iron door which they open to let the wild beasts out is bolted shut. But all the same, they are there. This ring is a fighting pit where men and animals meet and bodies are carried out. Two thousand years of brutal history, from the Colosseum onwards, look down upon my scuttling shadow.

I arrive at the fence and squeeze hurriedly in between it and the peeling wall, rubbing white flakes of rotted plaster into my shirt and jeans. Nicolás shuffles up to make room. There is no stone room behind us here. Just the wall, an 18in man-gap, and the barrier, about two metres wide with the stability of a good garden fence. There’s no way out, except into the ring.

“Hola,” says Nicolás.

“Did you get it properly when he was hit?” I ask.

“Possibly,” says Nicolás. “It is hard to know. I hope.”

“Did you get the blood on his jeans?”

“I tried. I hope.”

I’m wondering what will happen if he didn’t get the shot. The whole thing will have been pointless. This whole trip to Spain. The weeks of planning and organisation. And then the iron door swings open, and there is a pause, and all eyes are on the door. And then out comes the bull.

I knew there was going to be a bull this afternoon, and that Adolfo Suárez would kill it, in preparation for the one he will kill on Tuesday at Castellón in front of thousands of people. But I had not thought that it would be now. I had not been planning to be in the ring when he came. I had been planning, specifically, not to be.

He is around 600 kilos. Too heavy, really. He comes out quick, turns left towards us, covers the 30 or 40 feet in the blink of an eye (I know because, boy, do I blink) and hits the barrier hard, just as I’m ducking beneath it. It shakes. It splinters. He hits at it a couple of times, and I watch the plank joins, waiting for the horn to come through and open me up to my sweetbreads.

He scrapes a couple more times, and then stops. And I slowly raise my head above the fence and he turns one great eye towards me, and I look him in it.

I am at home at my parents’ house in suburban North London. It is mid-afternoon in the April after my A levels and before I go to university. I am at home because I have only two friends in the world, one of whom is in Thailand but didn’t invite me along, and the other of whom, Jules, is in Zermatt, skiing. I hate skiing. It’s dangerous.

The house phone rings. I know it’s not for me because I have my own phone line. For talking to my two friends. Then my mother calls up the stairs.

“There’s someone called Clive Harrison on the phone for you.”

Clive Harrison? Who’s Clive Harrison?

“Hello, this is Jules’s father. There’s been a terrible accident. Jules has been killed.”

Well, obviously.

It’s 21 years later, and I’ve just written a piece for The Times on the death by skiing of Natasha Richardson, which happens to fall very close to the anniversary of Jules’s death, about which I also write.

I get an e-mail from his little brother, Xander, who is now 32, to say that he enjoyed the piece, and so did his parents. I am delighted. I had worried. It’s 20 years since I spoke to them. Xander says he is living in Seville, and training to become a bullfighter.

I say that sounds dangerous. I’ll come out and see him before he dies.

So, the baby brother of my dead friend – dead from his passion for a dangerous sport – is training to be a bullfighter.

What is he thinking?

What does his mother think?

Who in the world ever heard of an English bullfighter?

Does he want to die?

Why does he want to die?

How much does it have to do with his dead brother?

Do they let Englishmen fight the bulls?

Do they really still have bullfights in modern Spain?

Do they have many?

Who the hell goes to them?

Why?

I’m being a bit disingenuous. I do know something about bullfighting. I’ve been to watch it quite a number of times. The phrase “I’m training to be a bullfighter” does not fall on my ears with quite the clattering alien hullabaloo that it would for a lot of Northern Europeans, to whom it mightn’t sound any different from “I’m joining the French Foreign Legion”. Perhaps, because I have a good idea of what it entails, it staggers me even more.

I am not a blood-sports person. I have never shot a pheasant or a deer. Or a gun. I don’t ride to hounds. I did not grow up thinking of the word “sport” as having to do with the killing of animals. But I flew to Spain expressly to watch my first bullfight in 1995, as excited about the watching of a paid spectacle as I have ever been.

I had a friend living out there who had been banging on about the corrida for years, and he had called to say he was in Seville, and if I was ever going to come to a bullfight, I might as well come now.

English lovers of the bullfight are almost without exception, I have found, financially independent, work-shy and disaffected with Britain. Disaffected in the way that all people are who develop a late and all-conquering love of a foreign country. It’s the same with people who go nuts for Russia or South America or the Middle East (never France or Italy, which are too easy and bourgeois) – they are always fleeing something, some failure, some terrible family burden or sexual disappointment. They ostentatiously straddle their two cultures, and make you feel less of a person for having only one.

And just as the Russianistas had their prime under communism, which enabled them to confront you with your own middle-class apathy, so the Hispanophiles were happiest under Franco, when it was all drought and donkeys and polio and their love of the nation could be seen to be noble and hard and visceral.

But now, with Spain so enthusiastically modernised, so heavily immigrated, so increasingly secularised and the very model of a new European state, the Hispanophiles have it harder, and the bullfight – which, paradoxically, is thriving more than at any time since the Sixties – is absolutely crucial to their belief in noble, ancient, hardcore Spain.

And I’ll admit, that’s one of the reasons I love it. I am depressed by modern travel. By the fact that everywhere I go seems the same. The bullfight, I anticipated, would throw me instantly into the ancient, terrifying Spain I knew from Laurie Lee, Orwell and Hemingway, and one or two sherry adverts with scary jumping horses.

I fell for it totally. I was shocked by the blood at first, as everyone is, and as Hemingway predicts that you will be, especially if you are a lady. But it’s less nightmarish now they don’t kill the horses. I was very much with Federico García Lorca, who considered the corrida “the last serious thing left in the world today”.

I fell in with some aficionados of a type that is ubiquitous in Spain, who go to the fights just to complain. They go specifically not to enjoy it. The bulls are not good. The bullfighter is old. He is not honest. He is faking it. He is not in danger. He is showing off. He is too artistic. He is not artistic enough. They spit. They boo. They wave their handkerchiefs and demand the removal of the bull.

In the mind of every serious bullfight fan, it seemed, was some Platonic ideal of a bullfight, some distilled essence of the Golden Age of Spain, which the real thing could only fail to imitate. And for this sort of fan, that endless failure seems to be the glory of it.

But I thought it was all just marvellous, and every fight more exciting than the one before. I went to see fights in the rings of Ronda, Jerez, Seville, Granada, Barcelona, Valladolid? I couldn’t get enough of it. Couldn’t believe that something this good, this different, loud and beautiful still went on.

There is no doubt that it is a brutal thing. And its brutality is ancient and grim, and every new generation of Spaniards struggles to accommodate it in his own Spanishness. And it has always been ancient, always been out of date, always been a struggle. As long ago as 1846, the British travel writer Richard Ford wrote, in his Gatherings from Spain, of, “These sports? where the present clashes with the past.”

And it clashes still today. But no more nor less. There are antis. But no more nor fewer than before. I’ve only ever seen them protesting in any numbers in Barcelona – and there it’s all bound up in Catalonian distaste for anything egregiously Spanish, which bullfighting most certainly is.

The bullfight, like blood sports in Britain (and, to a degree, horse racing), unites the top and bottom of society. The toffs own the land and the animals, the working man makes a living from it and/or enjoys the spectacle. Each finds a use for himself, high and low. It is largely the urban middle class that protests, in Spain as in Britain. For it is the middle class that is left out.

In 2002, I spent a month in Madrid watching bullfights every day during the Feria de San Isidro. One afternoon, I hooked up with my old secretary from The Times Diary, Ana Ureña, fashion flibbertigibbet and daughter of an Iberia executive, and invited her to a bullfight. “Eeooo,” she squealed. “That’s just for stinky old men and stag parties.”

Just a minute ago I e-mailed her. Now a fashion writer for the national newspaper ABC, she says: “Look, sons of bullfighters like Francisco Rivera Ordóñez and his brother Cayetano are treated like celebrities, or football players. They date models and beauty pageant winners. They model for designers like Giorgio Armani. But only because they are handsome and popular. People dress up and pictures appear in the next day’s social columns. But it’s mostly old people, the type who get excited when someone from the Royal Family attends.

“To my mind, it’s a cruelty sport. My family has permanent seats in the front row in Madrid. Seats worth €3,000 each [£2,700] but I never go. I promise you that the hip young crowd – ie, me – would much rather spend that sort of money on a Chanel bag.”

A few weeks after I received Xander’s e-mail telling me of his plans to become a bullfighter, I found myself in Jerez, at the feria, and so we hooked up for a drink, to see the bulls, and to talk about just what in the world he thought he was doing.

Turns out he’s writing a book on the back of a blog which began as a diary of the bullfighting year from the point of view of the spectator, but soon developed into something more unusual.

“I was very aware that the bullfight has been well covered by writers,” he says. “But always from the point of view of someone watching fights from the stands. I wanted to get in front of the horns. There is a moment when the torero leans his body over the horns to place the sword above the shoulders, so that it will breach the heart or sever the aorta, when he is totally exposed. I need to experience this to make it complete.”

And his mother is happy with this?

“I couldn’t say I truly know. I think she thinks the book is important, and trusts my judgment that the bull part is necessary. If anything, my father is the more concerned of the two.”

It’s very strange to meet Jules’s little brother now, aged 32. He was 11 when I last saw him, standing rigidly next to his parents and surviving brother at the entrance to Westminster Abbey as hundreds of people filed into Jules’s memorial service.

He’s turned out a bit too handsome. Enough to be almost a handicap, I think, as big breasts can be for a woman who wants to be taken seriously. In the old days, bullfighters were most often ugly, stunted peasants. These days pretty boys are more in demand.

Jules would be relieved that his brother is handsome. That sort of thing was important to Jules. And also that he went to Eton. Jules and I were at Westminster and he was very down on it as a place. Barely more than a fee-paying local school, he felt. He always wished he’d gone to Eton himself.

Thereafter, we have no idea what Jules would have done. He wanted to go to Oxford, but frazzed his A levels and was retaking when he died. Then he wanted to write. But who didn’t?

Xander did go to Oxford, moved from biology to PPE when it turned out he’d have to spend all his time in a lab, did postgraduate work in philosophy and science at LSE and then went to New York to study acting. In summer 2008, he performed in a play he had written at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London’s West End.

He smokes like Jules, pursing his lips and exhaling the smoke upwards, towards an imaginary air vent. He also walks like Jules did, only more so. Swaggers with his head held very high, his chest out and his shoulders back. He walks like a bullfighter, even if he isn’t one yet. I wondered where the idea to become one started, if not with the walk.

“I came to Seville when I was 23,” he says, “and we ended up with excellent seats watching a novillada [bullfight for novices] in which one novillero [apprentice bullfighter] did a portagayola, kneeling at the ‘gates of fear’ as the bull explodes out into the ring, and turning the cape around his head, to usher the animal past him. I knew then I was watching something remarkable.

“I left with the usual first-time reaction that it was very exciting, but also that this was a morally borderline pursuit. A good bullfight with an aggressive, charging bull, who died in accordance with his own atavistic nature, seemed to make up for the morally questionable activity of turning a violent death into a public spectacle. But a bad fight, with a bull that was merely defending itself, that clearly had insufficient adrenaline and so was in actual pain, was an ugly, cruel and vicious thing.

“I can’t think of many spectacles in the world which are evil when done badly but good when done well. That sense of existing on the boundary between right and wrong made me realise that it is a very important thing.”

Now, Xander is not planning to “become” a bullfighter in the sense that he will end up performing all over Spain in a traje de luces (“suit of lights”) in front of tens of thousands of people in vast arenas. That takes years. What he is hoping to do is to learn enough and practise enough to make it possible (though far from easy and far from safe) for him to kill a bull.

This isn’t like killing a pheasant, which a certain type of Englishman does without thinking several times in an hour on a misty autumn morning. Nor even like stalking and killing a deer, which many Englishmen think is such a drama (“We were out practically all day?”). To kill a single bull will take months and months of preparation.

“To make it happen, I needed the world of the Spanish bullfight to open its doors to me,” he explains. “And to open those doors, I was given some great introductions. One was to Adolfo Suárez Illana, the son of Adolfo Suárez González, the prime minister who, post-Franco, took the country through the transición to modern statehood.

“Adolfo Jnr, a lawyer and published poet, briefly followed his father into politics, but then chose to follow his footsteps in another way, becoming an aficionado práctico of the bullfight, killing big bulls, 500-600kg, and putting his life absolutely on the line.”

And so this Adolfo character takes Xander under his wing, and introduces him to the great Juan José Padilla (reputedly the bravest living matador, killer of the most dangerous bulls) and Xander also befriends the matador Cayetano (great-grandson of Cayetano Ordóñez, one of the inspirations for Hemingway’s Fiesta) and to scores of other people, all with a dozen names each.

At the time of our meeting in Jerez in May, Xander has already been in a ring once or twice. He has “caped” vaquillas in what are called tentaderos – non-lethal private bullfights in which young females of fighting bloodlines are tested to see if they will make good mothers of fighting bulls: to see if they are brave, if they charge straight, if they are responsive to the cape.

The young females Xander has worked with are much smaller than full-grown bulls, perhaps a third of the weight, but they are much faster, and carry their own dangers. They have killed matadors.

Ultimately, he will be given the chance to kill a three-year-old novillo weighing 350kg (three quarters of the average weight of a full-sized bull) by his friend Enrique Moreno de la Cova, who breeds the Saltillo bloodline. It will happen, he thinks, in late October or early November. But he’ll have to do a lot more practice before then. I say I’d like to see some of that. Maybe I’ll see about doing a piece.

E-mails go back and forwards. It is not a straightforward thing to arrange. At the same time as coming out to see Xander I’d like to see some other bullfights. Specifically, I want to see José Tomás, the sensation of the moment. He is, they say, the greatest ever. He is so still, passes the bull so close, it can only be a matter of time before he is killed. He was very nearly killed a few years ago, retired, but has come back and is now, they say, better than ever. Each time he fights, crowds flock to see him for fear that it is their last chance.

Tomás is fighting at the Monumental in Barcelona. Instead of fighting two bulls, as is usual, he will fight six, as a thank you to his home crowd who were so supportive in his time of need.

It’s a tear-jerking story. But I hear also that he first offered the six bulls to Seville and Madrid, but that neither was prepared to stump up his asking price of €1 million (£900,000) for the afternoon’s work. Only Barcelona was prepared to do that. So maybe it’s a thank you for that, too.

On the morning of July 5, I fly to Barcelona and meet up with Xander for a long lunch. We talk about what we expect from Tomás, from the bulls, from the crowd. We may be about to see the greatest fight in the history of Spain. Obviously, I do not want Toá?s to be killed. The whole thing is that you don’t want the matador to be killed. But it would be damn handy for the article.

Tomás is not killed. And he fights poorly. Maybe he’s having an off day. Maybe he was just banking the money. But to me, there was no heightened sense of danger, nor of purity, nor of poetry. Just 500 quid in flights, tickets and hotel bills down the Swanee.

But that is the thing about bullfighting. Death and glory are promised, but disappointment is most often delivered. Hemingway made it very clear that you should hope the first bullfight you see is not a good one, or you will be disappointed for the rest of your life.

And then, finally, the tentadero comes together. Adolfo Suárez Illana, Juan José Padilla, Alexander Rupert Fiske-Harrison and Giles Robin Patrick Coren have their date with destiny: Saturday, September 26, 2009, at the El Chaparral finca (estate) of María José Barral, in Las Pajanosas, near Seville.

Xander will fight vaquillas with a cape. Adolfo will kill a bull. That’s been arranged specially for The Times. All these years I have dropped into the bullfight, one of many thousands, made my moral decisions, but only spectated. The bull would have died that day anyway. Not this one. This one is being killed for me.

And not just for me. For you, too.

My few days in Seville are very bizarre indeed. Very high and low, suspended in the strange air between scavenging touts, scarred bullfighting paysanos and toffs with so many names I don’t have enough ears to get through the introductions.

I’m staying at a hotel owned by the Duke of Segorbe, who knows Xander for some reason, and on the first night am introduced to his tertulia (a sort of salon) in one of the drawing rooms there. We shake hands and I have half an idea that he is called Ignacio, and is the husband of Princess Gloria de Orléans-Braganza, who is the cousin of Princess Gerarda de Orléans-Borb?n (Nicolás Haro’s mother-in-law; her cousin, Jean d’Orléans, the Duke of Vendôme, laid claim to the throne of France in October this year), at whose home in Sanlúcar de Barrameda we will be staying the following night, and whose son-in-law will be taking our photos.

As we leave the tertulia and head off for a drink in town, Xander hands me a scrap of paper on which he has drawn a sort of family tree to help me negotiate the social intricacies of the coming days.

The next morning I call on Xander at his apartment, to take him for breakfast. It is a ground-floor set of rooms in a large house owned by Nicolás the photographer’s mother, Consuela Fernandez de Córdoba. There is a central courtyard, full of sun and painted white and yellow, like everything in Seville.

Xander’s rooms are lightless and cool, with a view out of huge windows to the white and yellow courtyard. Dark furniture, very Moorish.

“Nice,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “I walked in here the first time and said to myself, ‘Here, I can write.’” And then, luckily, he laughs.

On the way to breakfast, I ask him some questions I ought to get out of the way. For example, this year of dossing around Spain, hanging out with toffs, caping bulls, eating, drinking? How is he paying for it? His advance for the book, he says.

We chat about the state of the bullfight in Spain and the effect of the recession. Xander says takings are down by 30 per cent this year, which will have quite a knock-on effect on an industry that employs 200,000 people, kills around 10,000 bulls a year and has annual revenues of more than €1 billion (£900 million).

“Still, more people go to bullfights now than at any time in history,” says Xander. “Which is a function of tourism, population increase and a general increase in wealth. Although there is a generation gap. A 2002 Gallup poll found that 50 per cent of over-65s were ‘interested’ in the bullfight, compared to less than a quarter in the 25-35 bracket. But then that percentage goes up rapidly when a big new figura like José Tomás or Cayetano emerges.”

And it remains this popular because Spain is keen to keep in some sort of touch with its brooding, mythic past?

“Well, yes,” says Xander. “But it’s also because the Spanish are bloodthirsty bastards, and love to see animals killed.”

After breakfast we think about trying to razz up some sort of pass into the callejón for Nicolás (the callejón is the circular runway between the ring and the front row of the seats which can be entered only by certain authorised personnel), so that when we go to watch the big bullfight on Sunday he can get some decent pictures. It’s one of those Andalusian days where nothing is happening because it’s all happening “mañana”. And there’s not much to do except sit in bars.

Xander’s favourite bar is a small, dark little place with a scattering of bullfight posters, which was found for him, he says, by his old school friend, the English actor, Hugh Dancy. And indeed, we bump into Dancy there a couple of days later with his wife, the American actress Claire Danes. They are on honeymoon in Spain and have just been to their first bullfight, a wedding present from Xander.

But today there are no sexy American actresses tossing their golden hair around and constantly crossing and uncrossing their naked legs (what was I going to do, not notice?). There is just Mani, a scabrous old ticket tout, maybe 53 or 54, with a barrel chest and thinning, slicked-back hair, who looks just like Bob Hoskins and comes very much from the Hoskins school of character, Spanish-style.

He remembers that Xander owes him money, and some large notes are handed over. Maybe he can sort us out, maybe he can’t. Some more money will be needed. It’s bizarre that we depend on this porky old chancer to get the princess’s son-in-law into the callejón. But the bullfight is his livelihood. His daughter’s boyfriend is a novillero. Mani has the “bottom” end sewn up. But he is desperate to come with us to the tentadero tomorrow, to meet Adolfo Suárez, to get in with the toff crowd.

I ask Mani, through Xander, what he thinks of an Englishman training to kill bulls. He says, apparently: “It is important when bravery is declining in the bullfight that Alejandro does this brave thing in the ring.”

Yes, I say, but would a Spanish crowd pay to watch? Mani demurs. “Listen,” he says. “The only interesting thing is the ability, not the nationality.” But Xander says he is being especially liberal for our sake. And he’s not kidding. What Mani would say about it to his amigos is, I suspect, very different.

Later that night, we arrive at La Botánica, a vast botanical garden occupying a huge chunk of the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. A palace. A cab driver reluctant to go in through the iron gates. Very good tortilla left for us by the princess’s cook. An octagonal drawing room. Cool bottles of the family manzanilla, bearing the Orléans-Borbón coat of arms.

Our hostess, Carla, daughter of the princess, arrives with Nicolas, her husband and our photographer. And Xander’s old schoolfriend Dominic Elliot comes a little later, who’s going to film the tentadero. We drink some of the family’s brandy and, with an early start tomorrow, we retire early.

Or rather, I retire early. Xander, it transpires in the morning, has trouble sleeping. He finally nods off about 6am. He dreams that Adolfo is telling him, “Be ready to be ready” (in fact it was Mani, the old tout, who very helpfully spent two hours haranguing Xander about the importance of being prepared). He also dreams that Padilla was asleep in his father’s bed., Adolfo in Jules’s.

When my phone alarm goes to wake me for breakfast at 7.30, Xander is up, washed, dressed and smoking. It has rained very heavily in the night. If the ring is waterlogged the fight won’t happen. If it is just a bit wet, then it will. But it will be even more dangerous. Xander seems a bit different this morning. More self-possessed. A bit haughtier.

Matadors do not eat on the day of a fight in case they are gored and require a general anaesthetic. I do not ask Xander if he plans to have breakfast. He might as well; at the remote ranch where we are going, there will be no surgeons. But anyway, he doesn’t look hungry.

We drive out in Nicolás’s car in quite good spirits, past endless miles of wind and solar farms. Xander points out the window into the rolling plains and says, “Look, a cow. I think maybe it’s a Saltillo. She’s a beauty.”

“Quick, Xander,” says Dominic. “Kill it!”

Xander laughs. “It’s true they have to be eradicated.”

“Vermin?” Dominic mutters

And then the car is quiet again.

When we’re about ten minutes away from the farm, Xander puts on a CD of the music from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, as he apparently always does before a fight. It is very sombre. And also faintly ridiculous. Dominic and I, from the backseat, cannot help but take the piss.

Xander suddenly turns round in the front and stares at us, his face like thunder. And in a very fair imitation of Russell Crowe, he says: “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”

Funnily enough, there was always a soundtrack when Jules and I went out driving, aged 16 or 17. We’d neck a bottle of Smirnoff and Jules would take the keys to whichever of his father’s cars had been left at home that weekend, and he would drive us, unlicensed and underage, to a party. Or if not a party, then just around, listening to music. Xander, who was 8 or 9, was always there, asking what we were doing. And Jules always told him the truth. And then told him what to say if his parents rang.

We’d cruise the streets with the windows down, smoking. We’d look at girls, and they’d look back and not understand what two spotty kids were doing in a company chairman’s car. Then we’d race back through London at 80 or 90mph with pop music blaring, with very little idea of road signs, or where we were going. Jules’s favourite trick was to bomb the wrong way up Baker Street at midnight, watching the other drivers scatter. One night, in Hampstead, we hit a parked car at about 70mph, bounced, spun round and round and round, lights flashing, horns blasting, and finally came to a stop in the middle of the street, pointing the wrong way back down the road.

There was no sound then except the gruesome Austrian electropop of Rock Me Amadeus by Falco booming out of the stereo. And we looked at each other and laughed.

A year or so later, the police action on the accident still pending as far as I remember, Jules went out on his skis after lunch in Zermatt, hit a woman who had come out of her bindings, and was killed when something freakish happened with a broken ski or a pole, which I’ve never quite understood and don’t really want to.

The farm looms up in the distance, and then the ring, surrounded by ochre fields full of black bulls. I meet Adolfo and Padilla and they go off with Xander to change.

I go into the changing room with Nicolas, to maybe get some cool, black and white behind-the-scenes shots of matadors changing.

When I walk in, Padilla, with his massive sideburns, is already naked, sitting on a bench. He has a long scar running down his chest and the biggest balls I have ever seen. It seems an odd thing to mention, but it’s true. Like a pair of pineapples, they are. The bravest killer of bulls in all Spain has truly massive testicles.

I didn’t get a look at Xander’s.

Out on the sand, I pull Xander and Adolfo over for a quick interview. What are they expecting? What are the dangers? Etc.

Xander does not seem scared, just worried about looking foolish, about disappointing his friends, about not making any attractive passes with the cape.

I ask Adolfo if what Xander is about to do is dangerous.

“Of course,” he says, as if I am a moron. “It is very dangerous.”

How dangerous?

“He can die.”

Oh. Is he a good bullfighter?

“He is one of the bravest men that I have seen in the ring,” says Adolfo. “Because when you have the technique, you know you have that to fall back on. And he does not have this.”

Wow, brave because essentially clueless. Very British. Very Charge of the Light Brigade. Very trenches. Very scary.

I take a position behind a barrier in the ring, on the sand, in front of a little stone room, into which I plan to duck if anything comes for me.

No sooner am I tucked in there than the big, red, iron doors open and out comes the first vaquilla. Nobody would argue that this is the same thing as a bull. It is smaller, lighter, faster, bouncier, the ground does not shake when it comes bounding in. But it runs fast, straight for Padilla, who is out now in the ring, he passes it round him a few times with his cape (the big pink and yellow one, not the red muleta). As it passes, it leaps, all four feet off the ground, its horns passing close to his face. Bulls do not do this.

Now I understand how the tentadero works. Like a real bullfight, there is a process in place to tire the vaquilla until it charges more circumspectly and can be trained to the muleta, to drop its head, expose the back of its neck and be killed by a sword going in directly over the horns (as all bulls in Spain must be killed, by law). The difference here is that no stabbing or bleeding is involved in the tiring-out process and the “kill” is not a kill, just a slap on the hump in the place where the sword would have gone.

This happens with two, perhaps three animals. Nicolás, Dominic and I begin to wonder if Xander is going to be called. Xander looks worried. Whether at the prospect of fighting or of not fighting is hard to say. I doubt he could have told you himself.

But then comes the moment, when a suitable bull has been caped and tired and is ready for the muleta, when Xander is called. He walks out into the middle. And almost immediately the vaquilla is upon him (I can’t call it a “cow” – the bathos is too terrible). It bounds out of the shadow into the light. Xander stays still, moves the cape, the bull goes past.

Not bad.

It turns, it comes again, Xander passes again, motioning away from his body in a sweeping gesture, his right hand moving in a smooth arc from his left hip outwards, like a proud host presenting a lavish spread of hors d’oeuvre to his guests. Except that he’s holding a red cape in it, and a horned animal is going by.

Quite stylish.

The vaquilla comes again, Xander shuffles nervously (which you mustn’t do), he backs away (which you mustn’t do) and so the bull sees him (which is what will always happen) and it comes for him, and he’s in a bit of a mess now, tangled behind the cape, and the vaquilla charges him and he sort of pushes it away and scampers and Adolfo and a couple of others run on and entice it away with cape-swinging.

Less good. Less stylish. But still. You wouldn’t catch me doing it.

The rest is a mix of good and bad. Amazing that he can do it at all. Some passes are really very good, and then sometimes he quite naturally dances away from the bull (which you mustn’t do) and it sees him and hits him. He’s seen a thousand bullfights, he knows that’s not what you do. But instinct is instinct: a horned thing comes for you, you back off.

Once, he ends up sitting on the thing. That’s how he gets the blood on his jeans which I hope Nicolás has captured. Though an apparently bleeding arse is not perhaps the image Xander had most had in mind when we began all this.

Another time, Xander miscalculates and ends up holding both horns, physically pushing the animal off himself, and seeming to laugh at himself, or the situation. And, of course, that rather defuses the death-tension. And without the death-tension, even in a tentadero, it’s all sort of over.

The bull is different. The bull really is terrifying. After eyeballing me at the barrier it heads out into the middle of the ring to meet Adolfo, and its maker.

But this is not a great fight either. The bull is too big and it has been injured in transit, making it all the more difficult to contain – although the on-site vet has passed it fit to die, a very Spanish legal paradox.

When it charges the armoured horse of the picador right in front of my nose it is like dinosaurs fighting. Sometimes, when it charges the cape, it catches a horn in the sand and somersaults, turning over in the air in slow motion and hitting the ground like a grand piano dropped from a helicopter. If this happens in the professional arena, crowds get very upset.

But Adolfo fights it very bravely and elegantly. He has trouble killing it (you try killing an elephant with a toothpick) but eventually does, jointly with Padilla, both placing a sword, going a little round the side (which is legal if an attempt has first been made to go over the horns), taking fewer risks, choosing not to die here, in front of nobody, in the middle of nowhere.

The dying bull totters over towards Nicolás and collapses at the edge of the ring, where a tattered tree overhangs the wall and gives a small square of speckled shade. It twitches. A farmhand comes in to finish it off with a dagger strike at the top of the spinal chord where it joins the neck. He needs a couple of stabs at it. There is plenty of blood and twitching.

Nicolas cries aloud his revulsion with a series of Spanish “Yuks”. I beg for him to be silent. We can’t show how revolted we are, even if we are Spanish. What will they think?

Now, suddenly, I remember that I need a photo of Xander and the dead bull. It could make or break the piece. I have prepared him for this earlier in the day and now, as Padilla and Adolfo leave the ring, I hurry across to where Xander is smoking and drag him over to pose by the bull.

He is desperately uneasy about it. I know he does not want to be seen to be claiming another man’s kill. A number of men are watching. I put Xander next to the bull and tell him to look at it, look at me, look at the camera, look back at the bull. Then a man comes over with a dagger and sticks it in the back of the bull’s neck and waggles it, and the bull twitches. So now it’s even more dead. The man has a slightly scornful look in his eye.

I ask Adolfo to join the pose, and he won’t. He is not happy with the photographing of the bull generally. He feels it is disrespectful. I think of all those dead bulls I have seen applauded out of the ring. And the ones I have seen booed (I hate it when they boo the corpse). We pack it in, and a forklift truck that has been hovering by the ring doors comes in and scoops up the dead animal, struggling to get its prongs under the huge carcass, and then staggers off with it.

I realise that Dominic has been filming this, and Nicolás has been photographing it. And I tell them to stop. This is the sort of thing you record if you want to discredit the bullfight.

I tell them both to get rid of any footage of the forklift before they send their stuff to The Times. I do not even want people in the office to see this. I sort of wish I hadn’t. When a bull is killed in the public ring, a team of plumed mules comes in and the body is dragged out in a bloody arc across the sand with muleteers cracking whips in the air. It’s a mini-funeral. But the forklift truck is just a forklift truck.

How does Xander think he did?

He thinks he could have done better. He is disappointed. He thinks he did some good passes but that he kept getting hit. He thinks this is the result of not having been in the ring for a while. He was meant to be killing a bull in six weeks’ time, but he sees now he is not ready. He will put it back to early next year, start training hard, maybe enrol in a bullfight school to learn a repertoire of passes. And also to learn how to cape his way out of danger when it goes wrong. He will also need to learn how to kill with the sword.

Washed and changed, Xander says he has to phone his father. “He knew I was doing this today, and I said I’d phone to tell him how it went.”

I watch him pacing backwards and forwards in the dust outside the ring, speaking to his father. And it occurs to me only now that if he had indeed been killed in the ring, as was apparently possible, it would have been me who had to phone. And it would have been on Xander’s phone, because that is where his father’s number would be stored.

And the moment his father answered the telephone and heard my voice instead of his son’s (saying, “Hello, is that Clive Harrison?”), he would have known.

Via a roadside tapas joint, where we lunch with Padilla, who signs autographs for a queue of diners, we return to Padilla’s home, a sort of celebrity mini-ranch called Puerta Gayola. In the dining room are the giant heads of six huge Miura bulls (the fearsome breed Padilla is famed for fighting). There are also antelope heads, and other things he has killed with more modern weapons.

Upstairs there is a trophy room: more bits of animals, ears, tails, swords – a thousand photos of Padilla in the ring and posing with celebrities and politicians. And, bizarrely, his wife’s wedding dress on a mannequin.

He apologises that he cannot carouse too hard because he fights in Granada tomorrow. “Padilla,” he says, “is not Padilla tonight.”

Nonetheless, we retire to Sin Problemas, the bar and hideaway that he built in the grounds of his house, next to the practice mini-ring and the children’s playground.

We smoke big Dominican cigars and drink rum, and try not to mention (assuming we all notice) the grim smell of Spanish plumbing. (Padilla certainly notices – for in a surreal glimpse through the doorway as we arrive, I see the great matador scurrying round the place with a can of air freshener, like the Shake ’n’ Vac woman.)

We turn on the TV and watch, over and over again, the death of Paquirri, the last great fighter to die in the ring (and father of Cayetano and Francisco Rivera Ordóñez), which is being shown because he was killed 25 years ago to the day, the very hour.

“Shhhh?” says Padilla at one point. “This is the very moment.”

Over and over we watch the death. Paquirri gored through the femoral artery, and carried aloft around the ring on the great horn in his thigh. Padilla grows angrier and angrier, furious that Paquirri should have let it happen, furious that he made such a novice’s mistake.

It seems that Paquirri moved, backed off from the bull, and allowed it to see him. Just like Xander.

“Was Paquirri any good?” I ask.

“He was one of the best of that time,” says Adolfo. “But he was only as good as the poorest today.”

So we are in a golden age of sorts. Tomorrow the great Tom?s will fight again in Barcelona. Padilla will fight in Granada in front of a TV audience of millions (and be gored very badly in two places, and not fight again for some time), and we ourselves will see Daniel Luque at the Maestranza in Seville, French-born and only 19 years old, throw away the rule book by giving up the sword and performing naturales with both his left and right hand, and being awarded two ears, and we’ll wave our hankies and throw things, and he’ll be the guy I follow next year, when I go back, like I always do, despite the horror and disappointment of it all.

But for now, drunk, we go out into Padilla’s yard, where he picks up one of his training tools, a papier-mâché bull’s head mounted on a bicycle wheel, with wheelbarrow handles.

He takes up a position at one end of the yard, and Adolfo lurks in the lengthening shadows with a banderilla (barbed flag) in each hand, stamping his feet, as he would in the ring, to attract the attention of the “bull”. And then Padilla charges in a straight line towards Adolfo, who swoops in an arc and places the banderillas, “Thwack!”, right in the bicycle-bull’s papier-mâché hump.

He does it again a couple of times, and then he takes his sword. He faces Padilla and his wheelie-bull, Padilla charges, and Adolfo “kills”, drilling his sword perfectly into the sheath in the back of its papier-mâch? neck.

And then Xander has a go, wobbling on half a bottle of rum and the tired legs of a day’s excitement and anxiety. Xander “kills” awkwardly. But he kills. He goes over the horns. It’s legal.

Dominic, Nicolás and I cheer wildly. And long-dead Jules’s little brother takes a bow, watched by Padilla, the great slaughterer of bulls, and by Adolfo, son of the first leader of democratic Spain.

He has succeeded in what he set out to do today, more or less: survived the lunging of an angry, fighting bull-mother and successfully driven a sword into a unicycle pushed by a great matador as his friends, sitting on the sand, rolled pissed and giggling in the twilight.

Daily Telegraph: Tim Walker. Edited by Richard Eden, August 9th, 2009

Eton gets bullish

Is there any arena left in which Old Etonians are not excelling? After the Tory leadership and the London mayoralty, the school is now making its mark in the bull ring.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a 33-year-old actor, says he has been signed up by Profile to write a book, Into the Arena, about his exploits as an aspiring toreador.

“I’ve been learning to cape bulls with Adolfo Suárez Illana, the son of Spain’s first post-Franco prime minister,” he says.

His book is described by the publisher as “an involving exploration of a controversial subject”.

Peter Carson, the acquiring editor, adds: “Bullfighting is one of those subjects that attracts excellent writers: from Kenneth Tynan and Ernest Hemingway to A L Kennedy.”

La Razón: Rafael Peralta Revuelta, April 22nd, 2012

(La Razón is a right of centre tabloid similar to the Daily Mail. Rafael Peralta Revuelta is an author and amateur bullfighter, and son of one of Spain’s most famous professional horseback bullfighters and breeders of bulls.)

An Englishman in the arena

This past Easter Sunday, a British diplomat, Lord Tristan Garel-Jones, made a defense of bullfighting from the lectern of the Lope de Vega theatre in the classic Bullfighting Proclamation the Royal Maestranza of Seville. Bullfighting has always appealed in one way or another to the English. For some, it is a show that, far from their Anglo-Saxon culture, they describe as barbaric. For others it may mean something curious, full of mystery and romance. Such was the case of Joseph William Forbes, boxing manager who every summer went to Spain for his own particular taurine “tournament”. As do the members of the Club Taurino of London, who every year visit our city to attend the bullfights of the April Fair.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison is an English writer and actor, whom we salute at the gate of the Plaza de Toros. Several years ago now, he began to have contact with the world of bullfighting, with the help of family and close friends. Little by little, he went deeper into the secrets of the world of the bulls. He became an amateur bullfighter, fighting on the ranch “Zahariche” of the Miuras, and arrived at the point of killing a Saltillo bull on the ranch of the Moreno de la Cova family. He became friends with bull-breeders, of bullfighters like Juan Jose Padilla or Adolfo Suárez Illana. His experiences are contained in the book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight. As a philosopher and writer specializing in analyzing the behavior of animals, he recognized in England that there is a lot of hypocrisy about bullfighting. Last week gave a lecture at the University of Seville, explaining his vision of bullfighting. Fiske-Harrison opens a new door, fundamental and necessary, to the Fiesta Brava in Anglo-Saxon culture.

ABC: Mario Niebla del Toro, April 14th, 2012

(From the Spanish equivalent of the Daily Telegraph, ABC, from an evening where the breeders of the bull pardoned in the Royal Maestranza bullring of Seville in 2012, the Núñez del Cuvillo family, accepted an award from the Royal Aero Club of Seville.)

(Pepe García de Tejada, the consul general of Colombia, Gabriela Cano, Tristán Ybarra, Maria O’Neill, the paitner Cristina Ybarra and the English actor, writer and bullfighter Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

(Click image below to view full article)

(This was one of a long string of such prizes for them. Caja Rural did the same for Álvaro Núñez Benjumea and the matador José Marí Manzanares four days before, which I also attended, see below.)

Diario de Navarra: Cover Photo, July 8th, 2011

Untouchable

A clean run in the Feria of Saint Fermín

(I am circled in the red and white striped jacket enterring into the ring with the herd of bulls following the first bull-run of 2011 in Pamplona, capital city of the autonomous community of Navarre in Spain. The headline refers to the fact that none of us were gored.)

Expansión: Roberto Casado, August 28th, 2011

 An Englishman jumps into the ring in defence of the bulls

(This is a translation of: “Un espontáneo inglés salta en defensa de los toros.” An espontáneo is a member of the audience at a bullfight who jumps, illegally, into the ring to cape the animal with which the matador is fighting. Expansión is the Spanish language equivalent of the Financial Times.)

In a year of pessimism among aficionados of bullfighting, because of the effect of the economic crisis on the bullfights and the ban on bullfighting in Catalonia, a book published in England provides a dose of hope for the future of the spectacle by giving a sturdy defense of the ‘fiesta nacional’ from a new international perspective.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison attempt to ‘torear’ a young bull of Saltillo in the presence of the matadors Finito de Córdoba and Juan José Padilla (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a 35-year old Englishman, who studied biology and philosophy, a member of environmental organizations, who made began his career as an actor in London, recounts his two years of immersion in the world of bullfighting in the book Into the Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight.

Read on the Spanish language version of my blog, La Última Arena by clicking here.

ABC: Andrés González-Barba, June 4th, 2011

There is much hypocrisy in England about bullfighting

Author of Seville at the launch of his book at the Hotel Las Casas de la Judería, Seville. (Photo from ABC: Felipe Guzmán)

After three years of visits to Spain, has just published the book “Into the Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight” – which is sold on the Amazon website, where he reflects on his experiences in the world of bullfighting.

Read on the Spanish language version of my blog, La Última Arena by clicking here.

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011

Sport books of the year

Sunday Times: Nick Pitt, December 4th, 2011

Football, bulls, boxing and life and death — Nick Pitt cheers on 2011’s most inspiring sports books

Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Profile £15.99/ebook £15.99

Fiske-Harrison was drawn to bullfighting as a ritual of life and death, blood and dust. He may not quite match Hemingway’s prose or machismo, and as a man of modern sensibilities he feels bound to wrestle with the morality of it all. But, like Hemingway, he drank deep of the culture and had the guts to take on a bull himself.

Books for Christmas

Sunday Telegraph: Oliver Brown, November 27th, 2011

INTO THE ARENA: The World of the Spanish Bullfight BY ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON Profile Books, £15.99

Bullfighting was banned in Catalonia last year and yet has continued to capture both the quintessence of Spain and the extremes of sporting heroism. It exerted a fascination early upon Alexander Fiske-Harrison, who watched his first bullfight as a 23-year-old philosophy postgraduate student in Seville and embarked a decade later on a quest to understand the spectacle in all its cultural complexity. This is no passive work, however: he undertakes months of training with one of the top matadors, Eduardo Dávila Miura, to steel himself for the final act of his own corrida de toros. Uneasy ethical dilemmas abound, not least how much suffering the animals are put through. But this remains a compelling read, unusual for its genre, exalting the bullfight as pure theatre.

Essential sports books to give you inspiration over the Christmas period

METRO: Ben East, 30th November, 2011

Christmas is just around the corner, so browse our bookshelf of gift ideas and take inspiration from stories of achievement, recovery and redemption.

Many would argue that bullfighting isn’t a sport either – including, famously, Ernest Hemingway – but that didn’t prevent Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile, £15.99) making it on to the William Hill shortlist this year.

A few years ago, there was a spate of books by writers detailing their own attempts to break into professional sport – and Fiske-Harrison’s book is a fantastic addition.

He started out wanting to study bullfighting from a neutral perspective and ended up admiring the strange beauty of the torero, before venturing into the ring himself.

Whatever you think about the ethics of the bullfight, it’s a fascinating insight into a world we know little about but are quick to judge.

The best summer holiday reads

Sunday Telegraph: Michael Kerr, July 8th 2011

Want to immerse yourself in local culture and history while soaking up the good life? Follow our guide on what to read in the world’s top holiday destinations.

Spain

In Into the Arena: the World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile), an Englishman is introduced – literally as well as metaphorically – to el toro.

Summer reads for travellers:

Sunday Times: Brian Schofield & Anthony Sattin, June 19th 2011

What books should travel addicts be packing this year?

Colin Thubron, Carl Hiaasen, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Ian Thomson, Jasper Winn, Olivia Laing and Patrick Leigh Fermor make up the essential travel book list.

Mail on Sunday: James Owen, July 10th, 2011

Where Hemingway feared to tread

Into The Arena by Alexander Fiske-Harrison

* * * * *

Whatever you think of Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s account of his quest to become a bullfighter, you have to admire his guts. Not literally, happily, but there are times in his year as an amateur matador in Spain in which he seems likely to learn first-hand how cruel the arena can be.

Which perhaps is as it should be. For all his writing about it, Ernest Hemingway never went into the bullring. For Fiske-Harrison, the only way to justify bullfighting is by fully understanding the risks involved.

It is a far fairer contest than fox-hunting. The bulls weigh more than a ton, turn nimbly as ice-skaters and can lift a horse and rider up on the point of a horn. When the greatest current fighter, Jose Tomas, was gored at a bullfight in Mexico, he lost a total of 17 pints of blood.

No wonder studies show that psychopaths and bullfighters have the same unnatural calm body chemistry. In Spain, bullfighters are bigger celebrities than footballers.

But do the artistry and spectacle justify the suffering? Fiske-Harrison’s argument that the interplay between man and bull, when done with the highest skill, merits the tragedy will not convince many readers.

But his descriptions of the fights are compelling and lyrical, and his explanation of different uses of the matador’s capes is illuminating. One begins to understand what has captivated Spaniards for centuries.

This complex and ambitious book examines not only life in the bullring but also Spain’s cultural identity and modern ideas of masculinity.

Fiske-Harrison admits that with each of his fights he knows more, not less fear. When he kills his first and only bull he feels not triumph but overwhelming sadness for a life taken.

His point that the matador’s disregard for his own life in the ring makes him respect it more keenly outside appears incontestable. One only wishes that our own discredited sports stars were as wise.

(This review is not available online, a PDF of the print version is viewable here.)

Daily Mail: Mark Palmer, May 26th, 2011

The Old Etonian Matador dancing with death

A THIRTYSOMETHING Old Etonian sidled into a Spanish bullring and stared at a snorting bull weighing more than 70 stone.

‘I was living entirely in the placement of the bull’s horns, the direction of the blackness of his eyes  . . .  nothing else in the world existed for me, not pain, not fear, nothing.’

No, but most of us would still have made our excuses and left. For Alexander Fiske-Harrison that in itself would have felt like some kind of ritual death.

He’d spent two years waiting for this moment. His parents were among the spectators. His best friend from school was there. He’d trained hard. He’d drunk hard. He’d hung out with some of the greatest matadors of the modern era. All he had to do was slow the bull down with some crafty waving of his red cape and plunge the ‘killing sword’ between the sixth and seventh vertebrae.

Fiske-Harrison (right) is a writer and actor. He penned and starred in The Pendulum in London’s West End in 2008.

In 2000, at the age of 23, he attended his first bullfight while on holiday with his parents and immediately found himself agreeing with the poet Garcia Lorca, who said ‘the bullfight is the last serious thing left in the world today’. Eight years later he was lured into the extraordinary and rarefied world of Spanish bullfighting, ostensibly to see whether or not he agreed with those who want the sport banned.

But also because he couldn’t resist the adrenaline rush.

Others have been there before, not least Ernest Hemingway, the 50th anniversary of whose death neatly coincides with this travelogue. Hemingway concluded that bullfighting was ‘moral’ as it gave him a ‘feeling of life, death and mortality’.

Fiske-Harrison comes to much the same conclusion, albeit after considerable soul-searching, a couple of failed romances and endless Rioja-induced hangovers. Along the way, he persuades bullfighting’s head honchos – including the great Eduardo Dávila Miura – not just to let him sit in the expensive seats in Ronda and Seville but to enter the ring himself and put into practice everything he’s been taught and witnessed on his travels.

He develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, but what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it.‘In that ring are all the tragic and brutal truths of the world unadorned. It is for that reason, above all, that you cannot ban the bullfight, because it is already contained in the very facts of life itself. All you can do is turn away’.

Or go headlong into it, embracing the pomp, the artistry, the arrogance, the absorbing cultural and historical links that define what Fiske-Harrison calls ‘the dance with death’. He’s so committed to his task that he even takes himself to Pamplona to run with the bulls, where he avoids a goring but still ends up with a bloody shirt. He unearths some interesting facts. A crucial premise of bullfighting is that the bull has never seen a man on the ground before – he is herded entirely by mounted farmhands, who he won’t attack, unlike men on foot, who he will.

Furthermore, the first attempt to ban bullfighting was by Pope Pius V in 1567 and bulls are not the slightest bit exercised by red rags – it’s the movement of the cloth that enrages them.

Fiske-Harrison is guilty of very occasionally sloppy writing, but this is an informed piece of work on a subject about which we are all expected to have a view.

But what I really enjoyed about Into The Arena is that after nearly 300 pages I still couldn’t quite decide whether bullfighting should be banned or allowed to flourish.

Sunday Times: Brian Schofield, May 29th, 2011

Into the Arena by Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Bullfighting in Spain is more popular now than in its golden age, finds this study of its drama, and its morality

“Silence! A man risks his life here today!” For the past 30 years, Manolo Artero has stood before the crowd in La Plaza de Toros in Seville and uttered these words, before opening the doors to the bull pen. Then, from out of the darkness beneath the packed terraces, “a half-ton of pulsing muscle” will emerge, moving at 25 miles an hour and desperate for something, anything, to destroy. As Alexander Fiske-Harrison pithily puts it, you can debate the morality of the matador standing before this furious, doomed beast, but before you question his bravery, “You try fighting an effing bull.”

The unexpected backdrop to Into the Arena, Fiske-Harrison’s memoir of more than a year spent following Spain’s “national spectacle”, is the rude health of such an apparently controversial pastime. The self-governing Catalan region may have outlawed the sport recently, and Spanish national television may have dropped it on ethical grounds, but across the country there were over 2,000 fights in 2009 (resulting in roughly 6,000 fatally skewered bulls), more than three times the number held during the supposed golden age of toreo (bullfighting) during the 1930s. The leading matadors earn salaries comparable to the football stars of Barcelona and Real Madrid, have giant entourages of security and management, and seem preordained to marry a former Miss Spain and be featured in Hola! magazine.

But they earn their riches, no question — their bodies are covered with the scars of their trade: punctured thighs, torn scrotums, pierced cheeks, severed arteries. When the banderillero Manolo Montiliu died in that very Seville arena in 1992 (banderilleros place the barbed spears in the bull’s back to slow him for the matador), the beast’s horn had plunged so deep, doctors lamented, that “his heart was opened like a book”.

It is this world of glamour, fame and death that Fiske-Harrison penetrates in search of a solution to the “terrible quandary” of bullfighting: “When done well, it seemed a good thing; when done badly it was an unmitigated sin.” The outcome is a debut that, despite some flaws, provides an engrossing introduction to Spain’s “great feast of art and danger”.

The book equivocates on the history, but the fighting of bulls is thought to have come to Spain (with the Moors or the Goths) in the early Middle Ages — as a pursuit in which knights would joust the beasts from horseback, but would delegate the dispatch of the bull to a commoner, known as a matador or “killer”, who distracted the beast by waving a piece of cloth. By the 18th century, the riders (picadors) had joined the supporting cast and it was the matador who had become the bejewelled star, his cloth now a colourful cape. In the 20th century, General Franco heavily promoted toreo as Spain’s “national spectacle” and Ernest Hemingway made it a world-famous symbol of “grace under pressure”.

The stars of this book are, inevitably, the matadors the author watches from the stands and frequently befriends. There is José Tomás, “the Phenomenon”, often called the greatest torero — but still mortal: during one fight he is gored in the thigh and loses so much blood (17 pints) that the arena’s infirmary runs out, so the crowd fight to donate towards their hero’s salvation.

Then there’s Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (one of a pair of matador brothers who are mobbed like rock stars wherever they go), who quietly admits to the exhausting drudgery of death he has to endure, “a dozen fights a month for month after month”.

Most compelling of all is Juan José Padilla, the embodiment of an ageing fighter who can’t settle for the financial security he’s already earned, so he ploughs on, tackling the dangerous bulls his more celebrated rivals refuse. In the book’s best set piece, Padilla fights in his home town, Jerez, but with the stellar Tomás also on the bill. Stung by the rapturous acclaim heaped on “the Phenomenon”, Padilla undertakes a madly risky duel with a bull, “giving it an even chance, tearing the fabric of his jacket in a dozen places, blood running from cuts on his legs and torso”. The crowd, realising they could soon see a man die of jealousy, bellow “Basta!” (Enough!). To which he shouts helplessly into the night: “Soy Padilla!” (I am Padilla!)

As Fiske-Harrison watches the matadors train and relax, and even tries a few “passes” himself, the other stars (or perhaps fall guys) of the show slowly emerge: the bulls. Bred for aggression, speed and grace, they are prevented from ever seeing a man on foot until “match day”, to ensure that no memories of the human form dissuade them from charging that distracting, fluttering cape. (The most dangerous bulls are the quickest learners).

The bulls vary enormously in their nature — some refuse to dance their way to death, and get booed off; others are so “brave” that the crowd, and often the matador, plead for the president of the bout to deliver a reprieve. In another startling scene, Fiske-Harrison watches a matador “fighting to save the bull’s life” after the crowd have called for a pardon, making the creature dance and spin with sufficient vigour to warm the presiding judge’s heart. As the terraces chant “Toro! Toro!” the dignitary finally yields and signals for the gates to be reopened, liberating the heroic bovine to a long life of rest and breeding. As Ordóñez puts it, there’s a fraternity between matador and creature, both spilling blood for the mob: “It is like a friend. You do not want to kill it, but you have to, and that is your tragedy.”

Where the book begins to unravel is in Fiske-Harrison’s conversion, over the years, from moral agnostic to defender of the toreo. Bullfighting may have been sanitised — largely thanks to modern medicine’s ability to keep wounded matadors alive (the last one died in 1985) — into a €2 billion-a-year branch of Spain’s celebrity-entertainment industry, but it still has giant ethical questions to answer. Fiske-Harrison’s responses to those questions does not quite convince. His claim that banning the fight would mean the stunning dehesa (meadow) landscape of the breeding ranches “would be turned into farms for beef cattle” is a supposition (75% of Spain’s dehesa is already being conserved without bulls), and his stance that taunting a bull to death is ethically similar to eating a hamburger smacks of desperation.

One of the worst arguments is Fiske-Harrison himself. He resolves to understand bullfighting by trying it, and his book swerves from a fine piece of journalism into a “personal quest” to prepare for a fight. It’s a journey many readers will struggle to stick with. As the author, a bit too self-regarding to be an entirely likeable narrator, races against time to be ready to fight and kill a bull “within the projected publication date of the book”, it is hard not to pray that he’ll fail, sparing an animal a pointless death for one man’s ends. While Into the Arena begins by brilliantly capturing a fascinating, intoxicating culture, it ends by unwittingly exposing its fundamental truth — bullfighting is in part about young men killing animals to show off.

Financial Times: Dan Eltringham, June 4th, 2011

Into the Arena

Alexander Fiske-Harrison watched his first bullfight in Seville in 2000. Ten years later he found himself drawn to the sport and Into the Arena is the result, moving adeptly between matador-training, social history and a sometimes thrilling, sometimes tedious series of bloody fights and sherry-fuelled fiestas.

It’s to Fiske-Harrison’s credit that he never quite gets over his moral qualms about bullfighting; the book is at its strongest when he uses his degree in biology to investigate the cruelty question. “Wildlife conservation,” he writes, “is financially underwritten by the bullfights.”

Although Into the Arena is full of intriguing detail – a fighting bull will never get to see a man on foot before it enters the ring – at times its subject encourages a sense of writerly importance. However, the essential incongruity of an Englishman in the ring makes this book an engrossing introduction to bullfighting.

The Herald: Alastair Mabbott, May 21st, 2011

Plagued by conflicting feelings about bullfighting, writer and actor Alexander Fiske-Harrison decided the only way to resolve the issue was to spend a year in Spain immersing himself in bullfighting culture and training alongside professionals, then taking to the ring himself. Before he could conclude the spectacle of the fight might not be worth the life of an innocent creature, he felt he had to understand bullfighting at the deepest level. With Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon a constantly looming presence, Fiske-Harrison comes across as the kind of devil-may-care Englishman who built an Empire. But is he a man out of time? Does he really have to get into the ring with one of these creatures to decide whether or not it’s barbaric? An informative and breathtaking volume of gonzo journalism.

(This review is not available online, a PDF of the print version is viewable here.)

Spanish bullfighter Juan Jose Padilla is badly gored by a bull. Source: Supplied

“AT the first bullfight I ever went to,” Hemingway writes at the beginning of his 1932 nonfiction work Death in the Afternoon, “I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses.”

By the time I attended my first bullfight, in Mexico City in September 2010, the horses were not my concern. Coming to bullfighting nearly 80 years after Hemingway’s apology was written, I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the bulls.

Where Hemingway was writing of a time in which the horses were not protected with padding – a change that was made in 1928, and one he complained about bitterly – I was attending my first fight in a time in which the popularity of bullfighting was reported to be waning, in which the province of Catalonia had recently voted to ban it, and in which animal rights groups were baying, not for the bull’s blood, but for that of anyone who dare shed it. And what they had told me about what would happen to the animals, while mostly incorrect, was quite something.

Of course, Hemingway’s paean to the corrida de toros was out of date long before animal rights groups started picketing outside la Plaza de toros de la Real Maestranza de Sevilla or les Arenes de Nimes. And yet it would be impossible to discuss Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight without reference to the earlier book or its author. Death in the Afternoon remains the model for the English-language book on bullfighting and Hemingway the model of the English-speaking aficionado. As Orson Welles, who trained as a torero, told Michael Parkinson in 1974: “He thought he invented it, you know. He really did think he invented it. Maybe he did.”

Fiske-Harrison, who spent the greater part of 2009 and 2010 living in Spain and training as a torero himself, is well aware of this fact and dedicates nearly half a chapter to the writer to whom, inevitably, he will be most compared.

But it is worth pointing out that the similarities between the two works are mostly superficial. Both consist of 20 chapters that roughly follow the highly regulated structure of the bullfight: Fiske-Harrison’s by naming his chapters, somewhat arbitrarily until the last two or three, after the bullfight’s various suertes, or interactions between man and bull, in the order in which they tend to unfold, and Hemingway’s by devoting the content of each chapter to a discussion of each stage in its turn.

Both devote their final passages to what they might have written if they had written something else. “If I could have made this enough of a book,” Hemingway wrote, “it would have had everything in it.”

He proceeds to list, in muscular yet nostalgic prose that looks forward to The Snows of Kilimanjaro and A Moveable Feast, everything he could have written about but failed to: the landscape and the train rides through it, the drunken nights, the quiet moments with matadors before the fights. This is what makes Fiske-Harrison’s book so different to Hemingway’s and its subtitle so important: the writer recognises that “the world of the Spanish bullfight”, with its characters and its tragic tales, its poetry and its flamenco music, is often as interesting to read about as the bullfight itself, and often even more so.

Which is not to say his descriptions of the corrida aren’t at times incredibly engaging. But the quality that makes Hemingway’s final chapter the most intoxicating pervades Fiske-Harrison’s in its entirety: less a handbook than a memoir, less Death in the Afternoon than The Sun Also Rises, Into the Arena pulses with the writer’s love of the world and the people he has found himself among.

These people include the matadors Juan Jose Padilla, who lost his left eye in a near-fatal goring a short time after the book was published, and Cayetano Rivera Ordonez, whose great-grandfather was the model for the matador in The Sun Also Rises and whose grandfather Antonio was celebrated in Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer.

In the film Almost Famous, rock critic Lester Bangs warns a fledgling music journalist: “You can not make friends with the rock stars.” While Fiske-Harrison occasionally chides himself for failing this test, especially when he returns to Britain to write and finds his two worlds are increasingly incompatible, he allows himself to succumb to that failure. He takes up the cape, encouraged by his new friends, and begins training to fight and kill his own bull.

Not that Fiske-Harrison is unaware of the ethical problems. He writes that:

this thing, whatever it was, seemed balanced on a perfect moral borderline. When it was done well, it seemed a good thing; when done badly it was an unmitigated sin. How could anything straddle an ethical boundary like this?

For despite what its proponents and opponents may say, he argues, bullfighting does straddle such a boundary. In two well-researched chapters that look at the ethics of bullfighting from the perspectives of animal rights and evolutionary biology, Fiske-Harrison goes to lengths demonstrate how most of the arguments for and against the bullfight are as good – or, more commonly, as bad – as each other.

Observing that Spain’s fighting bulls live a far better life than Britain’s meat cattle, and offended by what he sees as the hypocritical and borderline xenophobic dissimulations of the animal rights movement, the author attempts to demonstrate how banning the bullfight would in fact result in a reduction of animal rights across the board.

Despite a passage in which the author dismisses animal rights gurus Peter Singer and Marc Bekoff in a manner that even supporters of the bullfight might find rather too cursory to be satisfactory, these demonstrations are mostly successful.

While Fiske-Harrison eventually dismisses his qualms, it is difficult to read his final chapter, “La escotada” – the thrust of the matador’s sword – without getting a sense that his year with the bulls has only deepened their mystery. It certainly hasn’t put an end to his concerns. Or, one suspects, his searching for an answer.

It is also hard to read this final chapter, or the postscript that follows it, without wondering what philosopher Mark Rowlands was on about when he called Fiske-Harrison vainglorious in a review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement. Hemingway was the target of similar criticisms when Death in the Afternoon was published, too, with that book and its reception sparking its fair share of literary feuds.

It only makes sense that a new English-language book about bullfighting should do the same, though it seems to me that only the earlier work seems unequivocal in its support of the spectacle. (Hemingway was also itching for a fight, going after everyone from Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley to William Faulkner and, more bizarrely, El Greco.)

I will not say too much about the more recent spat between the philosopher and the torero, except to point out that, while Fiske-Harrison perhaps mentions how many push-ups he can do one too many times, and while one gets a little tired of having to hear about his trips to Argentina to perfect his horseback skills or to Kruger National Park to observe the kudu, his tendency is towards self-deprecation as often as it is towards self-aggrandisement.

And he brings to the polarised discussion of bullfighting a level of nuance where his opponent – who once attempted to train his pet wolf to be a vegetarian – brings only more dissimulation.

Matthew Clayfield has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent in the US, Mexico and Cuba.

Books: Into the Arena by Alexander Fiske-Harrison

A British writer studies the history and ethics of bullfighting

Bullfighting is the world’s most divisive sport.

Depending on whom you ask, bullfighting is either “the last serious thing left in the world today,” as Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, or it is, as PETA claims, “a tradition of tragedy.” The Parliament of Catalonia voted in 2010 to end the sport beginning January 2012, a signal that perhaps minds are changing even in the traditional home of the bullfight, although many southern Spaniards say this is simply a separatist ploy by Catalonians.

If bullfighting is the most divisive sport, it is also among the most alluring, especially for writers, who have flocked to Spain at least since the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in 1926, which details – in glorified terms – bullfights, the running of the bulls in Spain and the culture that surrounds both activities.

British writer Alexander Fiske-Harrison became fascinated by the bullfight on a visit to Seville with his family in 2000 and returned regularly. In 2007, he published an article in the magazine Prospect inconclusively investigating the morals of the bullfight. The response was immediate and widespread: Fiske-Harrison soon found himself with a book contract, a ticket to Spain and a plan to stay for one year, immersing himself in the tradition and its key players. The result is Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight, a fast-paced, choppy account of his investigation and an evocative depiction of the controversial, dangerous world of corrida de toros.

From the very beginning, Fiske-Harrison makes it clear this will not be simply another book about the act of bullfighting, but rather a philosophical inquiry into the subject, trying to decipher its ethics or lack thereof. Fiske-Harrison sets out to decide whether it is wrong to kill these powerful animals for sport.

The author does come to a conclusion regarding the ethics of bullfighting, but thankfully, Into the Arena is not a philosophical tract or a screed in support of animal rights. Instead, it narrates the events of Fiske-Harrison’s year in Spain, meeting the aficionados, breeders and matadors who make up the world of bullfighting, a world he enters almost despite himself. There is the handsome young matador Cayetano Rivera Ordónez, the garrulous Juan José Padilla and the humble Adolfo Suárez Illana, all of whom the author befriends, affording him nearly unprecedented access to the inner world of bullfighting and breeding. It is in these portions – praying with the matadors before the fight and partying with them afterward – that Into the Arena is truly remarkable.

Fiske-Harrison bullfighting (from a poster advertising his lecture on the subject at the University of Seville during the April Fair this year)

The grit and sweat of these characters is conveyed in tightly wrought prose that acknowledges its debt to Hemingway, but sometimes nestles too close to Papa’s pen.

One of the most accomplished passages in the book describes a trip Fiske-Harrison makes to Pamplona, where he runs with the bulls before witnessing the garish, tourist-oriented spectacle that is, as he writes, the “only bullfight I will ever see in Pamplona,” one that lacks the art of the best bullfights he has witnessed.

Watching the killing of a bull he ran with earlier in the day, Fiske-Harrison writes, “I had run next to this great animal … felt some form of connection to the powers that propelled him. Now I watched them all turned inwards in an attempt to defy the tiny, rigid ribbon of steel within his chest, and having been blinded by no beauty, tricked by no displays of courage or prowess by the matadors, I just saw an animal trying to stay on its feet against the insuperable reality of death. I left the plaza de toros with tears in my eyes after that. And there was nothing good in all that place.”

This emotive, finely crafted paragraph is marred by the final sentence, which is cut-rate Hemingway. You can almost hear the author saying “eureka!” as he turned the phrase. [It's actually cut-rate Ezra Pound - see the The Tomb At Akr Çaar, line 11 - but he did teach Hemingway how to write... Ed.]

Elsewhere in the book, Fiske-Harrison relies on his journal to convey the details of bullfights and their aftermath. These sections, some of which are several pages long, are set apart by different font, and are usually introduced with a phrase like “Here is my diary write up at the time.”

Since virtually all of the book must have been compiled from journal entries and notes, one wonders why Fiske-Harrison didn’t simply work these passages into steely prose, and suspects this is a device to put the reader in the author’s shoes, so to speak. But such breaks in narrative actually foster more critical distance than Fiske-Harrison’s prose, which is seamless elsewhere, although at times he goes over the edge in his descriptions of the spiritual aspects of bullfighting, which he calls “a pillar of honesty” within our “media-driven” society.

But these qualms do little to detract from the powerful narrative of Into the Arena, whereby Fiske-Harrison evolves from a dilettante not sure how deeply he wants to be involved in bullfighting to a seasoned aficionado and, finally, an amateur matador. As the narrative moves forward, the writer’s opinions about bullfighting and the people involved in it become more subtle and more decisive, inching him toward his ethical conclusion on the sport even as he become more deeply entrenched in bullfighting’s complexities and mysteries.

Since the publication of the book, Fiske-Harrison has been touted as a new expert on bullfighting, a reputation the writer has duly earned with blood, sweat and study, and a fair amount of Spanish sherry. In this book, we see the development of that expertise.

Several decades ago, Into the Arena would have been a stunning exposé. As it stands, it is a thoughtful, well-researched and deeply felt investigation of a cultural anomaly as it teeters on the verge of commodity and taboo. By the end, Fiske-Harrison’s moral conclusions are an afterthought; what is worth saving here are the vivid evocations of men who risk their lives in a beautiful, vulgar battle with the bulls.

(Stephan Delbos is a New England–born poet living in Prague, the Czech Republic, where he teaches at Charles University and Anglo-American University and edits several literary publications, including The Prague Revue. His poetry and essays have appeared most recently or are forthcoming in New Letters, Atlanta Review, Poetry International, Zoland Poetry, and Poetry Salzburg Review.)

BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS

INTO THE ARENA: THE WORLD OF THE SPANISH BULLFIGHT

By Alexander Fiske-Harrison
(Profile Books 284pp £15.99)

YOU MIGHT THINK that Ernest Hemingway had bulls and Spain all wrapped up, but it is fifty years now since The Dangerous Summer, his study of two bullfighting brothers-in- law, was first published and more than eighty since his novel Fiesta, about a group of friends who go to watch the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Spain has changed immeasurably since then, shaking off the ‘black legend’ that for centuries branded it as a backward, fervid, superstitious and cruel society.

Yet some elements of superstition, fervour and cruelty still shape Spanish culture and none more so than bullfighting. The question of whether a modern society should endorse animal suffering as entertainment is bound to cross the mind of any casual visitor to a bullfight.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison first tussled with the issue in his early twenties and, as a student of both philosophy and biology, has perhaps tussled with it more lengthily and cogently than most of us. The germ of this book was an essay in Prospect (a ‘rather longwinded’ one, by his own admission). Into the Arena is an attempt to take the bull more firmly by the horns. In researching it, Fiske-Harrison spent nearly two years following a clutch of toreros, several of whom became his friends. He studied their art and learned some of it himself, all the while trying to come to a decision about the morality of a sport that is also an art form.

Writing: a dangerous profession (Photo: Tristán Ybarra)

His eye-witness reports of bullfights are particularly good. He transposes the spectacle into words with great success, conveying the drama of the corrida while explaining individual moves and techniques with eloquence and precision. One bull is ‘a paranoia of horn and muscle’. He is also knowledgeable about the different breeds of bull, some more deadly than others, and the great families whose names are synonymous with breeding bulls and fighting them. I didn’t know that bulls bred to fight never see a person on foot – only ever mounted – until they are in the arena. Bullfights in Seville are preceded by an announcement: ‘Silence! A man risks his life here today.’ I didn’t know that Orson Welles had trained as a bullfighter in Seville for four months under the name El Americano, or that the sport nowadays turns over 2.5 billion euros a year and employs 200,000 people for 2,000 fights. That’s a threefold increase since Hemingway’s time. And it’s strangely heartening to know that if you walk past a policeman in Seville carrying a half-concealed sword he will just smile and cry ‘torero!’.

Outside the arena Fiske-Harrison is less sure-footed. His conversations with off-duty bullfighters rarely get further than the ‘why do you do it?’ stage and seem to take place at social functions where it is hard to establish any intimacy. I wanted to know about these men’s homes, their families, their priests and the surgeons who patch them up time and again (many bullfighters have only one testicle apparently). We learn that a Madrid psychiatrist has found that the brains of bullfighters exhibit a similar neurochemical balance to those of prisoners classified as clinical psychopaths. Are bullfighters psychopaths then? It would be interesting to learn more.

I liked Fiske-Harrison much more in the final chapter, where he questions himself and his project. ‘As a spectator, I was always afraid I was missing something. As a protagonist, I was always … well, just afraid.’ Suddenly I felt I understood why Alexander Fiske-Harrison had wanted to learn to be a bullfighter, and to fight a young bull in front of his parents in Spain. He did it as a tribute to his brother, who was killed while practising another dangerous sport, skiing. I think he wanted to confront danger and survive, as his brother had not. It makes the final sentences of the book all the more poignant: ‘[If] your heart goes out to the bull, as it should, let it also go to the matador. For it is he who is your brother.’

José Tomás

The Spectator: Simon Courtauld, June 25th, 2011

Art and the raging bull

In these days of growing concern at the methods of factory farming and the welfare of the animals which are raised and killed for our consumption, it is instructive to compare the life of domestic beef cattle with that of a Spanish fighting bull. The cattle may have less than two years of life in cramped conditions, while the toro bravo roams free and unmolested on pasture for five years. Alexander Fiske- Harrison makes the comparison succinctly: ‘Five years on free-release and then the arena, or 18 months in prison and then the electric chair’. He maintains (there is some evidence for this, to do with beta-endorphins) that the fighting bull’s suffering is reduced because, once in the ring, it feels no fear, only aggressive anger. Ban the bullfight and this magnificent breed of animal would cease to exist. It is not a good converter of grass into protein, and anyway far too dangerous to be bred only for meat and milk.

The case for what in Spain is called la corrida de toros is well made in this entertaining account of two years which the author spent in Spain — following the bulls, caping young cows himself, getting to know matadors, attending ferias and flamenco parties. An initially reluctant convert to this Spanish cultural tradition, he comes to accept that ‘part of the justification of the suffering is the art’. When- ever he sees a bad and bloody corrida, however, his doubts over the cruelty surface again. Every aficionado has seen fights which are both shameful and plain boring. But when everything goes right, the spectacle can be absorbing, uplifting, even emotional.

What Fiske-Harrison seeks, as someone wrote of the great torero Antonio Ordoñez, is ‘a demonstration of the values which distinguish bullfighting from butchery’. Those values are concerned with technique, artistry, grace under pressure from a highly dangerous animal which is doing its best to kill its adversaries. In conversation with one of Ordoñez’s matador grandsons, Cayetano, the author learns of ‘the warmth a great bull could inspire in him, of his sadness at killing’.

Having returned to Oxford and read books on animal rights, he decides, that he must go back to Spain and kill a bull himself. Coached by a former matador, Dávila Miura, Fiske-Harrison proves himself brave and competent enough to reach what the Spanish call la hora de la verdad, the moment of truth, when he puts his bull to the sword and gains some understanding of what Cayetano had told him.

The only disappointment of this book is that it has a little too much about the author rather than ‘the world of the Spanish bullfight’. He might have considered the significance of religion — almost all bullfighting ferias are held in honour of a saint, or a festival such as Pentecost or Corpus Christi — the effect of the economic recession on the future of la fiesta brava, and of the ban in Catalonia (probably minimal: the encouraging response of the socialist government in Madrid was to hand over responsibility for bullfighting to the Ministry of Culture). He might also have discussed the ever-growing popularity of the corrida in south-west France, where it is conducted precisely as in Spain, and exploded the myth that bullfighting survives for the entertainment of foreign tourists. (When I attended a fight last summer in Malaga — the centre of tourism on the Costa del Sol — with a capacity audience of 12,000, I saw no foreigners there, nor heard a word of English spoken.)

Among the principal toreros of today, Fiske-Harrison gives brief mention to the two — Enrique Ponce and El Juli — who have dominated the scene for the past decade, and the faintest praise to José Maria Manzanares, who has emerged recently as both a consummate artist and master swordsman. One of the book’s best passages — which bears comparison with Kenneth Tynan’s outstanding book, Bull Fever — is the description of a performance by the controversial José Tomás in Jerez. This so-called phenomenon, or suicidal lunatic, having lost 17 pints of blood from a horrible goring in Aguascalientes, Mexico last year, is due to make his comeback in Valencia next month.

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS): Mark Rowlands, September 16th, 2011, No. 5659

(Due to the ensuing dispute over poor research, dishonest argument and reviewer bias, it has been decided not to reprint this review and instead readers are directed to the page “The TLS: A dispute of animal rights“)

September 30 2011

No. 5661

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bullfighting

Sir, – It seems the TLS chose a reviewer for my book, Into The Arena, (September 16) who not only dislikes its subject, bullfighting (Mark Rowlands is a proponent of vegetarianism and once tried to make his pet wolf into one as described in The Philosopher And The Wolf ) but also its author (I reviewed his book elsewhere, unfavourably: a “frustratingly limited work of philosophy”, “sterile” etc. – and he has published his views on this.) I am not saying this is the sole reason his review has been the only negative one of the book so far, but it certainly diminishes its claim to any authority. Overlooking his personal tone, I will focus on some of his errors of fact and logic.

First, Álvaro Múnera was not a “prominent bullfighter”, he never even achieved the rank of matador, retiring while still a novillero, a “novice bullfighter”. Múnera himself said in an interview on Radio Netherlands International that he became an anti-bullfight lobbyist because a friend’s aunt told him he was evil for killing bulls, just as he said he became a novice because his father told him to. So I do not find it “startling arrogance” to describe him in his own terms. (I do, however, find it so to publish without checking one’s facts first.) And the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura was not “at this time, giving lessons for a modest €35 an hour” but for €1,000 an hour, the fractional price being an exceptional offer to a friend of friends.

Rowlands also misleadingly edits a sentence by the taurine author Barnaby
Conrad. Conrad wrote that hundreds of bullfighters had died in the past three
centuries, and that of the 300 or so major matadors, one in six had died.
Rowlands turns that into a mere “fifty-two matador deaths in the arena since
1700”. However, as he points out, I argue that bullfighting is not a sport, so his comparative mortality statistics are irrelevant. It is a tragic performance spectacle, requiring the death of a bull.

Moving from facts to reasoning: having accepted that “the lives of fighting cattle are better than those of beef cattle, and death in the ring is no worse than death in a slaughterhouse”, he then claims that I am trying to justify one wrong by pointing out another. I never argued this. My thesis is that we are dishonest about our true views on the moral status of animals and that the evidence of this is our complicity with the meat industry, most of the output of which is of nutritionally negative value. And when I point out the veganism and anti-pet-owning stance of the animal rights campaigner Jordi Casamitjana, I am offering it as evidence of the endpoint of the road these two polemicists would have us go down with them. Rowlands also notably ignores my argument that if you ban bullfighting then the ranches will become farms for the meat industry, thus actually diminishing animal welfare in Europe (to say nothing of the environmental cost as wilderness is converted to pasture).

Finally, I am well aware that many animal rights philosophers try to evade the consequence of their theories which necessitate intervention in animals’ natural lives, especially predation. Rowlands himself argued in Animal Rights (1998) that since predation reduces starvation and disease in prey species, we have no duty to prevent it. However, as there are more humane culling methods than “death-by-predator”, this is simply wrong. In Rowlands’s schema, we have a duty to intervene both in the lives of wild animals – tofu for wolves, protective fencing for elk – and in their deaths – lethal injections for all.

It is ironic that a corollary of Rowlands’s philosophy is that he should be in favour of bullfighting, not against it. His ethical system relies on a Rawlsian “original position” according to which we should make the world into the best it could be for all, given that we don’t know who we will be when we are put in it; for Rowlands – but not Rawls – this includes being incarnated as animals. After research, I can say it is better to be a toro bravo than a meat cow in a factory farm in the United States or a buffalo on the African plains subject to disease, the elements, and a terrible death. A truth known to the 20,000 Spaniards, but not the handful of protesters they filed past, while leaving the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona last Sunday as its gates closed forever after ninety-seven years.

ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON
Las Casas de la Juderia, Barrio Santa Cruz, Seville, Spain

October 7 2011

No. 5662

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bullfighting

Sir, – Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s response (Letters, September 30) to my review of his book Into the Arena provides a nice example of the sort of failing for which I took that book to task – a reliance on ad hominem arguments that attack the giver of an argument rather than the argument itself. Thus, Fiske-Harrison suggests that my negative review of his book (September 16) was a tit-for-tat response to a similarly unfavourable treatment he gave my book, The Philosopher and the Wolf, elsewhere.

In fact, I do not remember his review being especially unfavourable. Indeed, following his review, we kept up what I thought of as a rather cordial email correspondence where I attempted, apparently unsuccessfully, to explain the moral arguments pertaining to animals. I did, of course, inform the TLS of the fact that he had previously reviewed a book of mine. So, I resent the suggestion that my negative review was the result of personal animus.

Contrary to Fiske-Harrison’s claim that my review was conducted with a “personal tone”, there is nothing in either the form or content of that review that is personal. Rather, I focused largely on his arguments in favour of bullfighting and showed that they were not very good ones. They exhibited a number of logical fallacies including question-begging (for example, with regard to his “It’s art” defence). There were other flaws that word constraints did not permit me to incorporate. I did not discuss his “if you ban bullfighting then the ranches will become farms for the meat industry” argument largely because it is a non sequitur.

Fiske-Harrison’s claim that the animal rights view necessitates “intervention in animals’ natural lives, especially predation” is false. Different moral theories will articulate the idea in different ways, but the core idea remains the same: predators must eat meat to survive. Therefore, they are permitted to eat meat. Ought implies can, as Kant put it. If you cannot refrain from eating meat (and “tofu for wolves”, as Fiske-Harrison sarcastically puts it, would, of course, kill them), then no sense can be made of the idea that you ought to refrain. Humans, on the other hand, do not need to eat meat. That is the relevant difference between us and predators. This is a simple idea that will be found in the writings of every major author who has written on animal rights.

Fiske-Harrison complains that I unjustly accuse him of a “two wrongs don’t make a right” fallacy. He writes: “I never argued this. My thesis is that we are dishonest about our true views on the moral status of animals and that the evidence of this is our complicity with the meat industry”. However, as I point out in my review, he makes the dishonesty charge precisely as a way of trying to deflect the “two wrongs don’t make a right” objection. I quote: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. The real answer would be, ‘ How can you dare say this?’” My point is – and was in the review – that the appeal to dishonesty cannot perform this function. It would be akin to a liar justifying his lying by pointing out that other people are liars too.

There are other disagreements between us. We disagree about the number of matador deaths. I say fifty-two in the last 300 years, Fiske-Harrison says (vaguely) “hundreds”. My claim occurred during the course of an argument to the effect that the ratio of dead bulls to dead bullfighters is generally understood to be several hundred thousand to one, and that Fiske-Harrison’s language gives a false impression of the dangers to bullfighters. Even if his “hundreds” is correct – which I doubt – this changes nothing in the overall argument.

I am willing to defer to Fiske-Harrison on the status of Álvaro Múnera as a novice matador. Nevertheless, his arrogance is startling. It lies in the assumption that he knows what is going on in Múnera’s mind when he undergoes a major upheaval in his core values. Fiske-Harrison reduces this to: he was “just doing what people told him to do”, which assumes that he has access to the contents of Múnera’s mind that, one might have thought, only God (if He existed) could have.

MARK ROWLANDS
Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida 33124.

October 14 2011

No. 5663

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bullfighting

Sir, – Mark Rowlands suggests in his letter (October 7) that all our dealings have been cordial, despite publishing on his blog in January 2010, “Alex the bullfighter, as I like to think of him, missed the point of the book is [sic] quite spectacular fashion… Way too complicated for a bullfighter wannabe. In general, I always find it wise not to engage with people impervious to reason, and this is my last word on the matter.” If only it had been. And my complaint was not that our previous dealings were not disclosed to the TLS, but that they were not disclosed to the reader.

As for his statement that I commit logical fallacies – had I written a philosophy text, then indeed, I might have been a little more rigorous in my reasoning, however, it was in fact a personal memoir of my time exploring what the subtitle of the book calls quite clearly, “The World Of The Spanish Bullfight.” Equally, his claim that my statement that banning bullfighting would lead to the conversion of the fighting cattle ranches into meat cattle farms is a formal non sequitur is entirely irrelevant: this is not an a priori deduction but an empirical induction. What else does he think land zoned as “for agricultural use” (rústico), which is farmed at uniquely low cattle population levels due to the tenfold price premium on fighting cattle stock over meat cattle stock, would become? Or perhaps this arm-chair theoriser thinks that the massively indebted Spanish government, which has already discussed selling off its protected forest and semi-forest (dehesa) to balance its books, will miraculously step in?

I have not the space to address Rowlands’ further arguments† and thank him for deferring to my factual knowledge (although I wish he had done so before publishing his review). However, when he says “there is nothing in either the form or the content of that review that is personal”, I worry about what his definition of personal is if it excludes speaking of an author’s “startling arrogance” and “vainglory.” And what is he doing if not arguing personally, pruriently, ad hominem, and assuming he has “access to the contents off [my] mind that, one might have thought, only God (if He existed) could have,” when he says,

“I cannot allay the suspicion that Fiske-Harrison is sitting in the bar with blood on his hands because he enjoys it, his red badge of courage, the more so since the passage is close to an account of women – married and unmarried – throwing themselves at him.”

ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON
Las Casas de la Judería, Barrio de Santa Cruz, Seville

(†The essence of what my argument would have been had I written a philosophical treatise defending bullfighting is as follows:

The vast majority of the English-speaking world indulges in the activity of eating meat for the purpose of the entertainment of the palate.

A significant minority of the Spanish-speaking world indulges in the activity of bullfighting for the purpose of a more general entertainment – combining visual spectacle, physical thrill, admiration of virtues such as strength (of the bull), courage (of both), athleticism (of both) and technique (of the man), and more subtle ones ranging from elegance to the representation of Man’s strugggle with Death.

Both of these activities have a consequence in terms of animal suffering, but, as Rowlands says:

The lives of fighting bulls are better than those of beef cattle, and death in the ring is no worse than death in a slaughterhouse. Let us accept this premiss.

The thrust of the fraction of Into The Arena involved in arguing in this area merely seeks to highlight these points. I put across my own views, which oscillate throughout the book, but I am not a proselytising moralist mounting a defence of anything, unlike Rowlands who once tried to force his pet wolf to become a vegetarian and then defended this act of cruelty in a book.

Perhaps some of my readers will go on to become vegetarians or vegans, and these will then criticise bullfighting and the meat-industry in equal measure. However, the fact is that most will continue to eat the same meat, but hopefully they will take a long hard look at what status they actually attribute to animals, as demonstrated by their behaviour, and maintain a slightly more dignified reserve when addressing the cultural traditions of other developed nations.

Nota Bene, the fighting bull enters the food chain after he is killed. Therefore, by Rowland’s own logic, the existence of bullfighting as a way to kill bulls is preferable to to its non-existence as it has superior welfare standards.

A word on my so-called “It’s an art” defence: entertainment – in the sense I am using here: of the palate, of the mind more generally– is generally held to be something that has an “aesthetic value”. As humans, we do indeed pitch aesthetic value against ethical value – if someone kills a cow to let it rot we think very differently of them than if they were to kill a cow to make beautiful leather shoes. As a professor of philosophy at a reputable university Rowlands should be aware that there are traditions in philosophy, such as are found in the early writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which go so far as to say that ethics are aesthetics are the same ( “Ethik und Aesthetik sind Eins.”) . This is too complicated a view to bring out here, and certainly unsuitable for a personal memoir about two years in Spain, but can be seen in phenomenon as various as the analysis of the concept “moral disgust” to the fact that the British Government thinks it right to shorten its citizen’s lives by spending £11.5 million to purchase Raphael’s ‘The Madonna of the Pinks’ for the country rather than on the National Health Service.

There are ways to attack the bullfight, of course, other than welfare. There is the accusation that it is a vice to wish to watch anything suffer and die, and perhaps it is, although I notice the human urge to watch such things on the stage or screen, from Elizabethan drama to Hollywood film, is not frowned upon. As for the charge that drama is fake but the bullfight is real: well, let us not pretend that the astonishing success of nature documentaries is because everyone wishes they knew a little more biology. Again, I am highlighting, not putting forward knock-down, logically-tight theses.)

Joe Distler, known as the “Iron Man” of Pamplona, has run every Pamplona bull-run for 44 years and been the subject of countless articles and documentaries. He is without doubt, question or challenge the greatest American runner of the bulls.

The latest issue of La Busca, the journal of the association “Taurine Bibliophiles of America” contains this review.

In 1967, in the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, I walked down the wrong isle heading for the fiction section and that brief misstep would change my life forever. There, lying in wait, was a copy of Robert Daley’s book, The Swords of Spain. Since Spain was always a place I had desired to visit, I picked up the book and the very first page I turned to had photographs of men running in front of Bulls. I was enraptured. Reading Hemingway had never really interested me in Pamplona’s “encierro” but Daley’s book completely freaked me out. It was, being a used copy, the best five dollar investment I have ever made! Not only did it convince me I must go to Pamplona immediately, it led to my friendships with Matt Carney, John Fulton, Muriel Feiner, Barnaby Conrad, Bill Lyon and a host of other fabulous characters who would go on to fill my life with wonder and joy.

Matt Carney & Joe Distler by John Fulton

Every year, before going to Spain, I still go back to Daley. The book is as fresh today as it was when I first read it standing in the stacks so many years ago. His vignette ‘Spanish Springtime’ still brings tears to my eyes and I wonder what magic made me find such a book?

Over the years, like so many aficionados, I have amassed a large library of taurine books but none ever affected me the way The Swords of Spain did. Not, at least, until recently.

Joe Distler, top right, running in Pamplona

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, top right, running in Pamplona

This past summer during the Feria of San Fermin (my 44th), I came to meet a young kid from the UK who was full of, as the great Matt Carney would put it, “fight and fury”. He came to my table decked out in a red and white striped blazer torn up the middle and gallantly exclaimed it was torn by a Bull that very morn. Well, only Charles Patrick Scanlan, Warren Parker and I wear such jackets during Feria and I know a little something about running Bulls, so I waited and was regaled with his recent encounter with los toros. His enthusiasm was such that I was taken aback. Rarely, in all the years of running, had I met someone so taken with what has become one of the great passions of my own life.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison running on the horns of a bull

Over the week that followed we became fast friends and shared stories of books and faraway places and , most of all, Bulls. It was then that I learned he had written a book about Spain. I ordered two copies sight unseen.

Joe Distler in his apartment with Alexander Fiske-Harrison

What a revelation his book was. Alexander Fiske-Harrison has penned one of the most engaging books on the Bulls I have ever read. I went through it at one sitting and jotted down many things I thought I knew about the world of the Bulls but didn’t. Not only is his book the story of a man obsessed with learning to fight a Bull but it is filled with Spanish lore and wonderful stories I am sure many of you have never heard before. (Did you know Frank Sinatra and a couple of Mafia types confronted Luis Miguel Dominguín?)

Alexander comes to Spain, meets several young toreros including Juan José Padilla and Cayetano, and Eduardo Dávila Miura, befriends them and they help him on his Quixote-like quest to fight a Bull. The story is riviting as one feels every failure, every success, every thrill as he heads toward a confrontation with a three-year-old toro bravo.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison with his toro bravo

But the book is so much more; like The Swords of Spain, it brings you into the world of the Bulls in such an intimate way you feel you must book a ticket on the next plane to Spain. I am not a traditional book reviewer and this is a rare outing for me in this genre so forgive a rather hackneyed presentation of a book that deserves so much more.

Joe Distler still running

When my wife, Nancy, arrived at our house on the Med for her summer vacation, I had a stack of books, as I always do, piled high for her summer reads. She chanced upon Alexander’s and, like me, read it cover to cover. “This kid has really got it,” she said. He sure has and I advise any and all aficionados to get a copy of Into The Arena as quickly as you can, open a bottle of Rioja, sit back and traverse with pleasure the world we so love.

La Divisa

Club Taurino of London

Number 202 September/October 2011

Book Review

David Penton 

INTO THE ARENA

Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile Books, ISBN 978-1-84668-335-0 £15.99)

As mentioned in the last issue of La Divisa, [former; see note at end - Ed.] CTL member Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s writing on the bulls first came to prominence when he wrote for the influential magazine Prospect  which carries in-depth articles on current affairs. His six page article entitled A Noble Death was prompted by his attending a corrida during the Feria de Abril in Sevilla in 2007. In it he examined whether aesthetics can justify the suffering of the animal. But we do not learn what the author himself believes. He concludes by writing “Whether or not that artistic quality does outweigh the moral question of the animal’s suffering is something that each person must decide for themselves – as they must decide whether the taste of a steak justifies the death of a cow.”  The article prompted more comment on the magazine’s website than any other in its history. And it led to Profile Books commissioning him to write this book and get to the bottom of the moral dilemma that he faced. Armed with an advance and a useful contact or two he set off for Andalucia to immerse himself in the world of bulls including learning how to torear  sufficiently well to kill a novillo himself.

First, what the book is not. It is not a book of reference, although there is plenty of information in it, and it is probably not for the serious-minded seasoned aficionado. There are errors, eg Las Fallas, rather than the Feria de Abril, is the first serious feria of the year: and the ring at the Miura ranch, Zahariche, is not the only rectangular bull ring left in Spain – indeed there are several including the beautiful one at Ermita de Nuestra Sra Belén just outside Puebla de Sancho Peréz near Zafra where they hold a novillada every September. What the book  does provide is a highly personal account, aimed at the general public, of one man’s adventures over a year and a bit in “the world of the Spanish bullfight.” And what adventures he has. He has been described as a 21^st century Flashman and we learn of his drinking sessions long into the night with matadors such as J J Padilla and Cayetano, now his “good friends”, of visits to ganaderias for tientas, running with the bulls in Pamplona, and of the ups and downs of his love life. He comes over as a larger than life character which makes for a hugely enjoyable and easy read.

But it is not all Boys’ Own Paper stuff. Through it all runs the thread of his moral dilemma. He is sickened by some of the fights he sees to the point of sometimes walking out, but is then lyrical about others to the point of ecstasy in a lengthy description of  José Tomás’s 2009 performance in Jerez de la Frontera. To all this he brings to bear what he learned in gaining his degrees in biological science and philosophy. But he is still searching, so he reads more and goes to meet people involved in the ethics  of how humans treat animals. While on this intellectual journey, he is finding it difficult to get sufficient practice and experience to be able to achieve his own kill. But then another introduction leads him to  retired matador Eduardo Dávila Miura with whom he arranges to have intensive coaching. Thus, by dint of  much hard work and fitness training, progress is finally made.

When he finally meets and kills his novillo before an invited audience it is a highly emotional occasion. His account is moving and instructive. He concludes “…despite the adulation of the crowd and my victorious killing, I couldn’t bring myself to revel in it. And sure enough, when I looked closely at the photos afterwards there was nothing in my eyes, only emptimess.” As so many matadors do, he felt respect for and a feeling of identity with the animal as it died. Finally he has resolved his moral dilemma and concludes with the statement that “And in that ring are all the tragic and brutal truths of the world unadorned. It is for that reason above all that you cannot ban the bullfight.”

The book has received excellent reviews in the mainstream UK press and hopefully people will buy it and decide to see for themselves. As he writes in the postscript “I have given you everything you need in order to decide whether or not you want to see a bullfight and hopefully something to help you understand a little better the glittering confusion of emotion and danger and gold that will unfold before you if you do.” I believe he has succeeded in this objective, albeit with a degree of hyperbole. But why not? After all, he has gone out there and done it.

Letters to the Editors

Dear Sirs

For various reasons I was unable to go the feria of San Isidro and attend the CTL lunch this year, not to mention witness Juan Mora’s triumphant afternoon in Cáceres, at which Ivan [Moseley] had the good fortune to be present. This enforced absence did give me some “me time”, and the great luxury of sitting at home undisturbed for a few hours, with a book. What a great read I found Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s Into The Arena!

I count myself an aficionada – probably one of those middle-aged aficionados of blood-anoraks Fiske-Harrison is rather condescending about; but that doesn’t bother me. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I felt that the author gave a truly balanced view of toreo, involved himself in several branches of el mundillo, and finally killed a bull, if not, as he spontaneously confesseed at the CTL meeting in May, a very big one. How many of us can claim that?

Into The Arena is generally well written; it’s been well researched and includes references to history, art, philosophy and literature, as well as toreo. Furthermore, it’s a page-turner, an easy read.

When I look back on my own experiences in the world of the bulls, since I was introduced in 1965, I realise that I too have met amazing people, have been invited to equally stunning places and have had wonderful times with a number of matadors, ganaderos and other members of the taurine great and good. I’ve even put together five passes and a pase de pecho with a vaquilla, and have an MA in moral philosophy (although not from Oxford!), but I could never have written a book that is so accessible and entertaining.

I say all this as someone who, like several members of the Club, has known the author for a perhaps a couple of years, without being able to count him among my close friends. No doubt other people will find fault with the details or be put off by the name-dropping, but I loved it. As our good friend Victor Mendes would say: “Chapeau!” – ¡Ehorabuena, Alejandro!

Yours etc.,

Mary Moseley

[Following the publication of this review and letter, I was sent various emails from a senior member of the CTL - which included remarks from other senior members - which led to my resignation from the club at the end of 2011. Then, at the beginning of the 2012, the editor of La Divisa, Jock Richardson, published an almost 5,000-word attack on Into The Arena, despite having printed this earlier good review. He has since withdrawn that attack, apologised in print, and published my rebuttal in which I systematically prove the level of his error and venom. It is reprinted in the post 'The Club Taurino of London: A dispute of authority' on this website here. Ed.]

“INTO THE ARENA” by ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON

01/11/2011. A BOOK REVIEW. By Tim Pinks.

Prescript: Just to let anyone know out there who cares, I had never met the writer of this book when first I read it. I had read a brief part of it in Graeme Galloways “No Bullshit” Pamplona fanzine of this year, and it was enough to persuade me to buy the book. (No mean feat…anyone who has read some of the stuff in “No Bullshit” will know that the quality is up there with the behaviour of some of the French in fiesta -merde- and I should know…I’ve written some bullshit for No Bullshit!). Sorry Graeme, I’ll try and do better next time…

But the small section that I read intrigued me, and because every year, post fiesta, I always buy a book about Spain as part of my rest and relaxation “come down” from the post Pamplona alcohol induced San Fermin fiesta fuelled hallucinations that I experience every year, I resolved that when, and if, I made it home, then this book would be the one I’d buy. And it was, and I did. So here’s the review.

“INTO THE ARENA” by ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON

Last news: ‘Into The Arena’ shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Prize
You can see a preview or buy the book in Amazon

This is an extraordinary book. It is about so much more than either I thought it was going to be about, or the blurb on the back cover says it’s about. There is a quote on the front of the book, “A hero from another age, a fearless Englishman touched by madness. His endeavour owes as much to Captain Oates as to Hemingway, as much to Flashman as to Don Quixote”. Or, put it this way, from the title of a song from the band, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, “They don’t make Jews like Jesus anymore”. Well, they don’t make too many Englishmen like Alexander Fiske-Harrison any more, either.

To put it very, very simply, it’s a book about bullfighting, written by an Englishman. Although that’s rather like saying “Lord of the Rings” is about a bunch of dwarves looking for a ring. Because, of course, the story about the Hobbits invents a whole new world, and AFHs’ book goes into what for most of us is a whole new world… that of the bullfighters, their teams, the ranch owners, their friends, their families, the hangers on… I thought I knew a little about the world of bullfighting, and I do, but this book took me to a different planet.

And for those of you who love Spain, whatever your opinion about bullfighting, this book is a superb travelogue that transports you to the very core of that amazing, passionate country. And for centuries, one of the main things Spain has been defined by, of course, is bullfighting, and Fiske-Harrison manages to get to the very blood pumping and bull running, (because the Spanish word for bullfight, corrida, comes from “correr”, to run), heart of that beautiful country. The bullfight.

From the very first page, when you read the surgeons chilling description of a bullfighter (Manolo Montoliu), who was killed in the ring in Seville in 1992, “his heart was opened up like a book”, I was hooked, and throughout its 300 pages the prose never failed to thrill me, or chill me, or make me smile, laugh, cry or choke up. Fiske-Harrison manages to open up the closed world of bullfighting, yes, like a book, and it’s a fascinating ride.

By the end of it, and I must admit I never quite saw how it would end, I still didn’t know if he was for or against bullfighting, or was he a neutral? Having read it again, I’ve come to the conclusion he is neither for or against it, or maybe he is for and against it. I think! I’m confused… William Skakespeare, through the lips of Hamlet, would understand… Oh, and by the way, AFH used to be a member of both the World Wildlife Fund, and Greenpeace, so he is no bloodlusting, cruel animal sports fanatic or anything like that.

The book came about after an article he had written for a magazine called “Prospect”, which, as he says, went worldwide, “from Al Jazeera to the Dayton Daily News”. That led him to phoning a friend in Spain, who invited him to see a bullfight in Madrid. The very next day he was on a flight to Spain, and the seeds of this book were planted. It was October 2008.

He has a fascinating use of language, and a way of writing that describes exactly what you think you have just read and understood, (and you have), but then uses something else to reiterate the point. For example, he equates a bull “fighting” and what’s going on in it’s head at the time, to seeing one time at his home in England a hawk plummeting to the ground with a pheasant in it’s claws. It’s owner, the falconer, came over and gently removed the pheasant from the hawk, and slipped into its place a half eaten pigeon. The hawk, as you might say, didn’t miss a beat, or indeed a bite, and carried on eating. The point is, to quote from the book, “for the raptor, there is merely the idea of [prey], indivisible and pure. For the bull, likewise, there is the perceived threat at that moment and nothing else”.

For the bullfight aficionados the descriptions of the bullfights are what might be described as “painting a canvas”, i.e: you can see it, as if watching it on television, he writes about it that well. Now, talking about bullfight fans, especially the “foreign” ones, (by that I mean, generally speaking, the non Spanish or South American ones), there is no doubt some jealousy regarding the book and AFH himself. How dare a complete unknown waltz into the world of toreros and corridas and write a book about it less than 3 years later… well, let me just say to those aficionados… Fiske-Harrison has gone into the arena, put his feet on the sand and faced some of these animals. And as someone who has never done that (but has run with, and mostly away from, the bulls in Pamplona), that takes guts.

As he writes in the book, “the number of times I have been interrogated, patronised and downright insulted by Englishmen who have [devoted their lives to bulls], I reckon goes into double figures. The number of times this has been done to me by a Spanish bullfighter, breeder or aficionado is much easier to estimate. Zero”.

Zero…remember, AFH came from almost nowhere, and entered, as a foreigner, into what is still a pretty much closed world for them, and gained not just the friendship of some of the most famous bullfighters and bull breeders on the planet…but also earned their respect. Think about that for a minute…he earned their respect. That is a hell of an accomplishment.

At one point he is talking to the bullfighter Cayetano, just 2 years qualified, who looks over the ring and says to him:

“That! That’s what I hate”.

AFH thinks he is looking at the Spanish flag, fluttering in the wind, and thinks he hates the flag of his country.

“No, the wind that makes it fly. The wind, that is what kills you”. (When the wind lifts the toreros cape, it can change the direction of the bull, and can be incredibly dangerous for a bullfighter). As he writes, “And this from a man whose father died in the ring”.

As mentioned earlier, this book is not just about bullfighting. It’s a wonderful travelogue through parts of Spain, that reminded me a little of what is probably one of my favourite books, “The Dangerous Summer” by Ernest Hemingway. And I mean “one of my favourite books”, period, as I am not a big fan of Hemingway, but I love Dangerous Summer because of the descriptions of travelling around Spain in the 1950′s. Well, this book also travels around Spain, a country that I love, but it also has history in it, as it is a superbly researched, historically fascinating read, but is also full of humour, and tears and laughter, and partying and Pamplona…and, literally, life and death.

There are heartbreaking moments in it too, not just of the bulls and their deaths (they are more or less brothers, after all), or of bullfighters, but of brotherly love also, not just amongst family, but amongst those in the taurine world who rsk their lives in the ring. Sometimes, completely unexpectedly, I read something that brought tears to my eyes. He has a way of giving you an “emotional punch”, if I can put it that way, but you never see it coming. Thanks to him, I finally understand what the word “never” can really mean. (You need to read the book).

For those of you who are just bull running fans, or are just hooked on the whole Fiesta of San Fermin thing, then that extraordinary town appears in the book too. I shant say too much about the Pamplona part, so as not to spoil your enjoyment and it’s only a small part of the book anyway, but there is a lovely, “put down” said to an English officer of the British Army, when AFH tells him briefly what he is up to. I have also used something similar a couple of times in the past, or just shown someone a couple of photos from my bull running days.

Also, any book which has this in it must be worth a look. It is from the wife of someone called Adolfo, a very good amateur bullfighter who occasionally appears on the main card with the professionals. The lady in question, Belen, asks Fiske-Harrison, “But why does an Englishman want to write about bullfighting? This is not what the English are interested in. They are polite and weak and rich and mainly homosexuals. Obviously not you, Alejandro…”

If I ever meet her, I hope I have one of my (very few, admittedly), bull running photos with me…

And thanks for the description of us English, Belen, as most people think we are just a bunch of fat, balding, foul mouthed, kebab eating, binge drinking, fightng, vomiting yobs. And that’s just the women…

I could go on and on, and I’m sure some of you think I have gone on enough already, but may I just say this: this is a beautiful, wonderfully written and hugely entertaining book, that is about so much more than just bullfighting. It’s about life, and death, by someone who knows, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Postscript.

When I first read “Into the Arena”, I had never met Alexander Fiske-Harrison, but I knew of him, as the band of “international drunks” as Hemingway called them, the Pamplona crowd, is, although not small, connected by that one thing: San Fermin.

But since them I have met him, at a pub in London. I didn’t exactly expect him to arrive in an ambulance and be escorted out in a strait jacket, but I thought I might detect something, a streak of madness, a twitch…but no, he was just (or at least, appears to be!), an ordinary man, although an obviously talented one, who has written an extraordinary book. We had a couple of pints and talked a lot of bull, you might say, and he was, if I can steal something he inscribed to me in my copy of his book, “a man well met”.

Hasta la proxima pinta, Alejandro.

You can read too:
The Last Arena, Alexander Fiske-Harrison´s Blog
Alexander Fiske-Harrison Section in Prospect Magazine
The Pamplona Post, by AFH… News, Gossip, Rumour & Lies from the running of the bulls 2011
Into The Arena, AFH, The World Of The Spanish Bullfight

In the May/June issue of La Divisa, the magazine of the Club Taurino of London, there appears the following apology by one of the editors, Jock Richardson (which I have edited for brevity):

INTO THE ARENA

In my editorial in La Divisa… I spelled out my updated editorial policy. In it I wrote… “Every Member of the CTL has the right to space in the pages of La Divisa to express their views on the Fiesta and the Club and to report their taurine experiences in the manner that they feel suitable with the sole proviso that nothing will be published in the magazine that has the potential to offend members of the CTL, the afición as a whole or members of el mundillo taurino…”

Judging from [a] letter… from [BBC Broadcaster, writer and CTL member] Robert Elms and discussions I have had with Alexander Fiske-Harrison, and on reflection upon them, it becomes clear that I very soon departed from my own policy in the article I wrote on Into the Arena by making remarks that were offensive to each of them. In Alexander’s case, I suggested he had lack of respect for the Fiesta and its protagonists and that he might have intentionally used information that was wrong to make a point. I am now persuaded that it is possible to respect the Fiesta greatly and at the same time to make errors in statements about it, and that it is possible to use faulty information inadvertently. These are things that I should have realised before I wrote the article. I am very sorry that I broke my own policy on this matter and promise that I will endeavour never to do so again.

I intend to make a full apology to Alexander in the next issue of La Divisa and to give him space to express his views on my article.

As he says, in the issue of La Divisa that will follow, there will be another, longer apology, and my rebuttal of the article concerned. Here is that rebuttal:

A rebuttal of Jock Richardson’s article ‘Into the Arena by Alexander Fiske-Harrison – a blood anorak’s view’

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

I fully acknowledge that there are a fair few errors in my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight (website here), although it is a long way from having one on “nearly every page.” There are several causes for those that there are, but no excuses.

Some of the errors were introduced as I was writing ‘on the hoof’, and – as I say in the book – I began by only having seen a half dozen bullfights and read a handful of taurine authors in English like Hemingway, Tynan and Conrad. My ignorance and the weak attachment to accuracy by those authors – and sometimes the taurinos who were my guides – are the original source of certain errors, which then remained in the manuscript due to the rush to publication and improper fact-checking by myself and my publishers.

Obviously, towards the end of this project, my focus was more on training in order to fight and kill a three year old toro bravo than spellchecking my manuscript, but that is not an excuse either.

However, these errors were not merely highlighted as unfortunate and unintentional false statements in Jock Richardson’s article, but were inflated into falsifications – termed “bullshit” and “bunkum” and, more seriously, “a lie” – and described as indicative of a lack of respect for the Fiesta Brava, the people I describe and the readers of the book itself.

Personally, I see this as an abuse of power by an editor of a magazine in an article that was, ironically, not exactly error free itself. That I have taken this no further than demanding a written apology and space for this refutation is a mark of my affection for certain members of the club of which I am no longer myself a member, having had it made clear to me by certain ‘senior’ members last year I was not welcome. I think this can be taken as sufficient proof of the falsity of Richardson’s first claim: that there are only two English aficionados that I have “found to be reasonable and likeable.”

Taking his criticisms in order – although I shall end long before Richardson does – I will also pass over his opinion-stated-as-fact that Madrid is not the head of the world of bullfighting, nor Seville the heart. As for where it was born, it is clear that we define differently the abstract notion “modern bullfight”.

My first actual mistake was to say in chapter one:

“La Maestranza was begun in 1759, when the gently Borbón Carlos III inherited a solid Imperial throne and a growing economy and population… Las Ventas, by contrast, came a century and a half later. It was opened as part of the Great Exposition of 1929 by Alfonso XIII.”

In fact, La Maestranza was not “begun” 1759, although that was indeed the year Carlos III took the throne and lifted the ban on bullfights, leading to the construction of the plaza de toros in 1761. I was misled by reading of the master architect Vicente San Martín’s completing the design for the building in 1758, and then corridas in the old Plaza del Arenal in November 1759 (rather contradicting Richardson’s claim that “there was no need for a bullring in Seville that year.”)

However, there is no denying that 1759 will not be the date in the next edition of the book and I regret that it is there in the first. I missed this error and I take full responsibility. It is ill-fitting that my book, a copy of which was housed at the invitation of the Teniente de Hermano Mayor in the famous library of tauromachy of La Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla on their 250^th anniversary should have their birthday wrong. (You can see this confirmed here.)

As for saying Las Ventas was “opened” in 1929, that was similarly wrong. I was misled by the bloody great big sign above the main gate that reads: “Año 1929, Plaza de Toros.” (See photo below.) Richardson is quite right to point out that it was not inaugurated until 1931 (although, as the sign suggests, it was completed in 1929.) Richardson goes on to correctly point out that the time between the dates of the deaths of the matadors Paquirri and El Yiyo was 11 months and 3 days, not 12 months and 6 days.

I would like to point out here, however, that fumbled dates are not “bullshit”, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “nonsense, rubbish.” They are errors, and minor ones at that.

Next in his list, Richardson takes the first half of chapter two and quite wrongly dismisses it as out of hand as “bumkum”, which the OED defines as, “empty clap-trap oratory; ‘tall talk’; humbug.”

Perhaps my prose is unclear but in the passage in question I describe a vet treating a recent indulto at the finca El Grullo in November 2008. I asked if this bull was Idílico, a bull famously fought by José Tomás in Barcelona earlier that year and then pardoned. The mayoral said it was not, and pointed to a field of calves saying Idílico was in there. I could not see him at first, and then some farmhands went in on horseback and singled him out so the vet could take a look at him.

I took a photo – reproduced below – clearly showing that contrary to what Richardson says, I did “meet” Idílico. Richardson also questions the very existence of the other pardoned bull whose pic wound was still open as, the “other recently pardoned Núñez del Cuvillo bull was Mirón, pardoned on 18 August 2007 by Jesulín de Ubrique,” and his wounds would have healed by then.

Again, this is not true. A Núñez del Cuvillo bull called Lanzafuegos was pardoned in Tarifa in Cádiz province on August 8th, 2008, after being fought by Javier Conde. This is the bull I saw (compare the photo below by Nicolás Haro of the unnamed pardoned bull being treated the day I was at the ranch, and the footage of the vet photographed above treating Lanzafuegos. They are clearly the same bull. The footage is at the bottom of the web page here.)

I am not saying I am faultless. I did note down the wrong stretch of road on my way to meet those bulls as the Route of the Bull, wrote Alfonso IX where it should be X, and how I managed to write “100 years earlier” about Longshanks’s expulsion of the Jews from England rather than “200 years earlier” I will never know. As for my not noticing the countryside of Aragon on my train from Barcelona to Pamplona to run the bulls, well, I had other things on my mind. However, this is no reason for Richardson to indulge in misleading hyperbole and say:

But this is the work of a man who can… place Enrique Morena de la Cova’s palace in the non-existent Palmas del Río.

To imply that the insertion of an unnecessary “s” makes Palma del Río, birthplace of El Cordobés, “non-existent” is to mistake the difference between misspelling and making things up.

However, what I cannot forgive is to come to the end of this catalogue of minor errors by me – and far graver ones by Richardson himself – and write the following:

It should be clear by now that Fiske-Harrison has precious little respect for his readers. He does not much respect the Fiesta about which he writes or the people about whom he is writing.

How the hell can anyone deduce from those mistakes – only a percentage of which actually are mistakes– that I lack respect for the Fiesta Brava? If errors in an impressionistic travelogue are evidence of a disrespect, then, a fortiori, what are errors in an article of correction if not a sign of contempt?

Pedantry and sophistry aside, I think that anyone who has read my book, or my articles and interviews in newspapers from The Times to The New York Times to Emirates inflight magazine, or heard me on radio stations from the BBC to Talk Radio Europe to US National Public Radio, or seen me on television channels from CNN to Al-Jazeera to Channel 5 – I think anyone who has encountered me on any medium or even in any bar, knows the depth of my respect for the Fiesta Brava, whether or not they disagree with my views, my background or my tone of voice. I have, and this is no exaggeration, sweated and bled for bullfighting. I still limp for my first few steps every morning from a Miura becerra that caught me in Zahariche as I attempted to better understand this world so I could do it justice in my book.

That is the homage I paid to the bulls, and the debt I paid to my readers as well. As for the toreros and ganaderos I wrote about: they are still my friends and I continue to see them regularly, like Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (I was with him in April), Juan José Padilla (I was at his home the day before his reappearance at Olivenza this year), Eduardo Dávila Miura (I was at the Astolfi finca with him a fortnight before his CTL class went there) and the Núñez del Cuvillo family (I shared the sand with José Marí Manzanares at El Grullo in March). No greater evidence of mutual respect is needed than that.

Does it, in light of this, really matter that I put two “c”s in Ricardo Gallardo’s first name? Or that I spelled Curro Vázquez’s surname “Vásquez” (a valid variant spelling of this Galician surname)? As for using the Hispanized spelling of the Portugese surname “de Mendoça”, “de Mendoza”, so does Portal Taurino, ABC and El Mundo. Which is what makes the statement that follows these three examples – “One sometimes wonders who the taurinos are about whom Fiske-Harrison is writing” – seem, well, just wrong.

(Richardson himself misses the entire Rivera name out of “Francisco and Cayetano Ordóñez” and claims I “spent time” with Fran Rivera whom I had not even met. Bibilical phrases about beams and motes spring to mind.)

Moving on to a genuine mistake on my part: I did repeat an unverified claim that Eduardo Dávila Miura had usually been in the top ten on the escalafón taurino during his career. However, as I also said, “I regard it as meaningless” – believing toreo to be an art-form –I did not check what I was told by another torero (not Eduardo) as I should have done. Eduardo was actually only once in the top ten and “usually” the top thirty. I made a mistake. However, Richardson does not say that, but instead claims:

To make this one out to be anything other than a downright lie is to be generous indeed.

Let me be clear: Richardson’s statement is not true. Nor is it a reasonable false supposition given the evidence available to him. It is thus defamatory to the point of libellous.

My other statements about Eduardo I stand by, except the one from the cover blurb, which, following standard practice – as Richardson should know as an editor – I did not write. (I note that writing this did not prevent Richardson from availing himself of Eduardo’s classes on toreo and the chance to face a vaquilita under his supervision, on the second annual course which I originally arranged for the CTL.)

I could go on – I was right about Fandi’s indulto, which Richardson bizarrely admits after 230 wasted words– but that would be to fall into the same error as the article I am rebutting. I made mistakes, but 4,700-words were not required to demonstrate this, nor was inflammatory language needed to make the point that accuracy has its virtue and purpose.

I wrote a personal memoir of two years travelling through the world of the Spanish bullfight (this is where this subtitle derives from, not the book’s comprehensive nature.) Taking into account its shortlisting for Sports Book Of The Year, and almost universally excellent reviews across the majority of the national press and internationally as well, it has been nothing short of a triumph at increasing understanding of the Fiesta Brava, whatever its failings when viewed – erroneously, and against all my written warnings within – as an encyclopaedia of tauromachy.

I found it particularly ironic that this article should be brought to my attention while I was composing the lecture on my views on bullfighting I had been invited to give in the old Royal Tobacco Factory building of the University of Seville. You can imagine my thoughts on taking a break from writing that address to read: “Fiske Harrison should have known that the Spaniards who told him that he knew an amazing amount about los toros must have been… indulging in politeness or ego-boosting or both.”

I have never claimed to know an amazing amount about los toros, but I will happily accept another polite and ego-boosting accolade from a Spaniard, who is also a noted author and aficionado práctico from a great taurine family, Rafael Peralta Revuelta, who said the following in the Spanish national newspaper La Razón:

Alexander Fiske-Harrison is an English writer and actor, whom we welcome to the gate of the Plaza de Toros. Several years ago, he began to have contact with the fiesta de los toros, with the help of family and close friends. Little by little, he went deeper into the secrets of the world of the bulls… Last week he gave a lecture at the University of Seville, explaining his vision of bullfighting. Fiske-Harrison opens a new door, fundamental and necessary, to the Fiesta Brava in Anglo-Saxon culture.

I had always thought that that, in part, was what the CTL was there for. However, in his article about my book, Jock Richardson attempted to do quite the reverse.

(A transcript of my talk is available on my blog in English of that talk is available on this blog here, or in the original Spanish here.)