From the front cover:

 

“Into The Arena” stands as a seminal work on bullfighting, unparalleled in its depth and perspective among English language texts. Its blend of personal narrative and cultural analysis elevates it beyond a mere account of the corrida, positioning it as a key reference for understanding the complex interplay of tradition, art, and ethics in the bullfighting arena.
Chat GPT 4.0

“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

“Thrilling. An engrossing introduction to bullfighting.”
Financial Times

“A powerful and compelling view into an unknown world.”
The New York Times

“Incredibly engaging… pulses with the writer’s love of the world and the people he has found himself among.
The Australian

“The Englishman who became the great expert on bullfighting.”
¡Hola!

Into The Arena is available in paperback or as an e-Book

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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 Search 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

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, red and white jacket, 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)

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 English prize-winning author and journalist, broadcaster and conservationist. 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 under Marlon Brando) and works works as a postgraduate at the School of Neuroscience at King’s College London. He has written for, and been interviewed in The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The TLS , Spectator, Prospect and Condé Nast Traveller, GQ and Tatler magazines and ABC, El Norte de Castilla, Diario de Navarra and ¡Hola! magazine in Spanish. He has appeared on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, RTVE España and the Discovery Channel with Bear Grylls. He wrote, and acted in, The Pendulum which debuted in London’s West End in 2008.

https://intothearena.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/the-book-3/

Awards, Shortlistings and Listings

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011

(Annual British sports literary award sponsored by bookmaker William Hill.

The world’s longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing prize.)

 

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.

Reviews in British Newspapers

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.

Reviews in International Newspapers

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.)

The Weekend Australian: Matthew Clayfield, January 28th, 2012

Death in the afternoon revisited by a beginner bullfighter

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.)

Reviews in Magazines

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.

Contact the author

The second edition of Into The Arena will be published in November by Mephisto Press, a subsidiary of Mephisto Productions. The author can be contacted via Lucy Gould on lucy@mephistoproductions.co.uk