About The Book

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

Into The Arena is available in paperback or as an e-Book on Kindle from Amazon (the UK here, in the US here, Australia, Canada India, Spain, Mexico, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and Brazil.)

 

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 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

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 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.) 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.

Reviews in Magazines & Periodicals

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’.

(The TLS: A dispute of animal rights)

In the September 16 issue of The Times Literary Supplement (No. 5659) the animal rights philosopher Professor Mark Rowlands of Miami University reviewed Into The Arena. That review cannot be reprinted, but here is the correspondence which followed in the letters’ page of the TLS.

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.

Anti-Bullfighting Publications

The most important review of my book from an anti-bullfighting activist was, unfortunately, in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement and is dealt with on the page ‘The TLS: A dispute of animal rights’. I say unfortunate because the TLS is the first place I published, aged 21, in a letter titled ‘Hume and Kant’, defending my one time lecturer at Oxford on political philosophy, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, against Professor Peter Gay, the Yale historian. It saddened me greatly that a literary magazine which I had written essays of philosophy for since that letter, and which counts among its contributors Henry James, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, should hire a reviewer for a book on bullfighting who is so against the death of animals that he tried to force his pet wolf to become a vegetarian, something which he had written about in a book which I had previously negatively reviewed myself in Prospect magazine, a review which he had attacked on his blog. All in all, a very poor choice indeed.

The second most important review was from the League Against Cruel Sports. Although it was negative overall, they still had some nice things to say:

Alexander Fiske-Harrison spent a year immersing himself in the bullfighting culture of Spain, with the seemingly noble aim of trying to gain a greater understanding of it.

Animal welfare issues are sporadically raised, but are always dismissed as being subordinate to the “art form” of bullfighting. In Fiske-Harrison’s mind, the prolonged suffering of an animal for human entertainment is acceptable because it stirs emotion in an audience.

To his credit, Fiske-Harrison does at least acknowledge the morally questionable nature of the bullfight. And the book does contain some interesting explorations of concepts such as fear, bravery and drive.