A Celebration of

The Reform Club and Spain

Thursday 16th May 2013 at 7pm

The evening will commence with a Reception at 7pm., to take place on the Gallery, when members will be invited to enjoy acorn-fed Iberian ham and Gazpacho, served with Gonzalez Byass’s Palo Cortado Leonor sherry. Dinner will be served at 7.30 pm in the Smoking Room, prior to which Father Jorge Boronat will offer Bendecir la mesa

Musical entertainment will be provided between courses when Isabel Maria Martinez Garrido, guitarist, and Ricard Rovirosa, pianist, will perform some memorable Spanish pieces by, among others, the composers Manuel de Falla and Enrique Granados. The evening will be further enhanced with an address by Alexander Rupert Fiske-Harrison, renowned academic, writer, broadcaster, and actor, who will speak on ‘The British and the Bulls: A History of Love and Hate from Charles I to Churchill and beyond’ Alexander, pictured in the photo is a sought after speaker whose topic is guaranteed to provide much food for thought.

The Club is honoured that the Spanish Ambassador to London, His Excellency Frederico Trillo-Figueroa will be present. His Excellency will be accompanied by Mr. Fidel López Álvarez, Minister for Cultural and Scientific Affairs.

Embajada de España en Londres

Oficina de Asuntos Culturales y Científicos

INTRODUCTION OF THE SPEAKER ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON

(Reform Club May 16th 2013)

Mr. Chairman

Ambassador

Ladies and gentlemen

As you all know it is nearly impossible to resist Audri’s enthusiasm when she is on the march; so, I have no option but to go along and, i must confess, happily become another victim of her charm. Thanks to her initiative and the support of some others we all are here tonight enjoying a delicious Spanish dinner and prepared to listen to our speaker.

When Audry invited me to look for a speaker I was thinking on someone knowledgeable of both Spanish and British cultures. The task seemed easy, since I had nearly a million Britons living in Spain to choose from, but I finally decide to get someone living in the UK; at least it was much cheaper.

Tonight speaker, Alexander Fiske Harrison, is, first of all, son of a former Reform club member and very appropriate for tonight speech, because he loves his country and Spain too He’s an Oxford graduate in biology, actor, writer and journalist, runner before Pamplona’s bulls and even torero!

In the summer of 2008 Alexander Fiske Harrison was acting in a play two streets from this club, in the Jermyn street theatre. That play went so “well” that he decided to give up the stage for the sand of the bullring and moved to Spain to write about the – for him – alien world of the Spanish fighting bulls.

By the spring of 2010, the London times was calling him “the bullfighter-philosopher”, even though he had never fought a bull (and he never made it beyond the second year of his doctorate in philosophy!)

In 2011 his book “into the arena” was published and was shortlisted for the William Hill sports book of the year award, even though he wrote in the book, and in the daily telegraph on the eve of the prize-giving, that bullfighting is definitely not a sport. No wonder he did not win.

Tonight we have the opportunity of listening to a real Oxbridge British on his personal experience in Spain. The title of his speech is “The British and the Bulls: a history of love and hate from Charles I to Churchill and beyond”.

With you Mr. Alexander Fiske Harrison.

Thank you.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Palma del Río, Spain, 2010 (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

Su Excelencia, my Lords, Ladies and Gentleman,

When I originally came up with this title, I thought I would be speaking for longer, so forgive me if this seems a little shorter and more anecdotal than you might have hoped.

So, for my first anecdote: the day after published my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight (http://www.intothearena.co.uk), I was in a taxi on my way to be interviewed on the BBC. The driver, hearing the address, asked what I was going there for. I said I was being interviewed about bullfighting.

“Oh, I can’t be having with that…”

“…I know,” I said, “it can seem terribly cruel…”

“…no, it’s not that.”

“What then?”

“My mother always told me never to play with my food.”

This anecdote is the frame to all our talk about bullfighting in Britain, but it is so often forgotten. The debate is not about “animals”, a word which we always associate with our pets, but what we do to things which we kill for food, before we do the killing. The toro bravo, the distinct breed that is the Spanish fighting bull, enters the food chain, although nowadays most of it is not for human consumption. It is too tough. The fighting bull is reared in natural forests and meadows until the age of five, running and combating with his herd mates, building hard muscle.

The 3 million or so cattle we kill in the UK die at eighteen months after largely corralled lives. Of the 35 million they kill in the US, 78% are factory farmed. And the fact is we don’t need to eat meat – vegetarians live longer –we eat it for the flavour, for the pleasure of our palates: these millions are killed for entertainment, just like the six thousand fighting bulls in the rings of Spain last year.

Here you have the first problem with after dinner speaking about bullfighting… it is hard to deal with it lightly. It is a serious thing. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca went so far as to call it “the last serious thing left in the world today.”

I think it is statements like that which often rouse British scepticism. There is a certain Latin poetic temperament, an operatic temperament almost, which thrills to seriousness, to drama, to ritual. And this is found in spades in the world of the bulls. The man who taught me most about bullfighting, the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura, whose uncles breed the so-called ‘Bulls of Death’, the Miuras, once said to me – “fighting with bulls is like talking to God.”

The British find this sort of talk hyperbole, melodrama. We like our courage discrete, our stiff upper lip to be discharged with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow.

In contrast, the opening sequence of the bullfight is a man, wearing silk and gold, standing erect and still in front of a half ton of charging bull, and bringing the bull past him with the capote, the large cape, in a move called the veronica, named after Saint Veronica, who wiped the face of Christ with a cloth on his way to Golgotha as the bullfighter wipes the face of the bull. No wonder the British and Spanish don’t always see eye to eye on this!

Which brings me to me neatly to my first little historical aside and a sentence I dared myself to say in this august company: following the unfortunate events of the Spanish Armada…

… and the often forgotten, equally disastrous, English Armada the following year our two kings, James the First and Philip the Third, agreed on a peace, and as part of that came to a deal by which James’s second son, Charles, would marry Philip’s second daughter, Maria Anna.

Plaza Mayor, Madrid

The short version of the story is that Charles’s brother died, he became Prince of Wales, and negotiations stalled. So Charles visited Spain incognito in 1623 with his friend the Duke of Buckingham, travelling under the names of Thomas and John Smith and arriving at the British Ambassador, Lord Bristol’s door in Madrid rather to his surprise.

The Spanish King was informed and so, in the way of Spain, immediately arranged a bullfight in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid. Here is a near-contemporary account which, for some reason, begins halfway through.

Therefore, after the three bulls had been killed, and the fourth a coming forth, there appeared four gentlemen in good equipage; not long after a brisk lady, in most gorgeous apparel, attended with persons of quality, and some three or four grooms, walked all along, the square a foot. Astonishment seized upon the beholders, that one of the female sex could assume the unheard boldness of exposing herself to the violence of the most furious beast yet seen, which had overcome, yea, almost killed, two men of great strength, courage, and dexterity. Incontinently the bull rushed towards the corner where the lady and her attendants stood; she, after all had fled, drew forth her dagger very unconcernedly, and thrust it most dexterously into the bull’s neck, having catched hold of his horn; by which stroke, without any more trouble, her design was brought to perfection; after which turning about towards the king’s balcony, she made her obeysance, and withdrew herself in suitable state and gravity.

Sir, did you ever see, or hear, any example to parallel this? Wonderful indeed! that a faintJiearted feeble woman, one would think, should stand in the fields undauntedly, after her attendants had quickly made their escape, yea, and have overcome such a furious creature as that bull was.

…

I will not conceal the mystery of the matter from you. This person was a man, though in the habit of a woman, of great experience, agility, and resolution, who had been well inured to this hard labour at several other occasions, whom they appointed to be disguised so much the rather, that the Prince of Wales might be the more taken with the thing.

(James Salgado, 1683)

Now, no record exists of Charles’s immediate reaction, but I think we can deduce from the fact that he not only returned to England and demanded we declare war on Spain, but also married a Frenchwoman, that perhaps this bloody show, the climax of which was the revelation that the woman was actually a man all along – a transvestite torero – hadn’t had the desired effect on the Royal guests…

It is hard to see when during the evolution of the bullfight this scene is set. There has been a transition in that history from a knightly jousting of bulls, after which the bull was finished off by a servant of the knight – a man known as the killer, the matador – to the servant’s metaphorical ascendance over his master, who became his picador.

This climax of this usually located in the 18^th century, with Pedro Romero of Ronda, the first matador to bring art to the arena as well as risk.

What does one mean by art? Well, by this point, the corrida de toros had its present structure of three acts. Opening with the matador with the large cape, then the testing of the bulls fortitude and ferocity against the lancer on horseback, the picador, then the display of athleticism which is the placing of the barbed banderilla-sticks, and then finally the dance with the matador ending in the kill, the moment of truth, and the moment of greatest risk to the matador.

That there is risk is undeniable, although courtesy of antibiotics and surgery’s astonishing advances, no bullfighter has died in some years. That said 533 noted matadors, banderilleros, and picadors have died in the past three centuries – and that’s just the noted professionals.

It is during an early phase of the evolution in this deadly “art” – I always think of it as a tragic play with a ritual sacrifice at its heart – that my next character appears, George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron.

In the Childe Harold Pilgrimage, Byron describes a bullfight he’d seen in Cadiz during his Grand Tour in 1809 thus:

Thrice sounds the Clarion; lo! the signal falls,

The den expands, and Expectation mute

Gapes round the silent circle’s peopled walls.

Bounds with one lashing spring the mighty brute,

And, wildly staring, spurns, with sounding foot,

The sand, nor blindly rushes on his foe:

Here, there, he points his threatening front, to suit

His first attack, wide-waving to and fro

His angry tail; red rolls his eye’s dilated glow.

But by the end:

Foil’d, bleeding, breathless, furious to the last,

Full in the centre stands the bull at bay,

Mid wounds, and clinging darts, and lances brast,

And foes disabled in the brutal fray:

And now the Matadores around him play,

Shake the red cloak, and poise the ready brand:

Once more through all he bursts his thundering way –

Vain rage! the mantle quits the cunning hand,

Wraps his fierce eye — ’tis past — he sinks upon the sand!

And Byron’s conclusion ?

Such the ungentle sport that oft invites

The Spanish maid, and cheers the Spanish swain.

Nurtured in blood betimes, his heart delights

In vengeance, gloating on another’s pain.

(1812)

Now, there is no denying that the bullfight was much bloodier then than now, not least with the injury and death of the horses, which has not occurred since the introduction of the peto armoured covering in the 1920s.

However, the heart of the matter is that Lord Byron, was that most British of things – and I include myself as one too – an animal lover. He famously wrote a four verse epitaph to his late dog, Boatswain.

So, having called myself an animal lover, what was my first response to a bullfight? Similar it seems to a member of your club, the novelist Henry James, who wrote:

I ashamed to say I took more kindly to the bullfight than virtue, or even decency, allows. It is beastly, of course, but it is redeemed by an extreme picturesqueness and by a good deal of gallantry and grace on the part of the espada [matador].

(1876)

I was very lucky in the first bullfight I saw – in 2000 in Seville – as the first matador, in fact a novice, a novillero, called El Fandi, was very good.

This nineteen year old walked across the ring before the bull had entered, right up to the toril, known as ‘the gates of fear’, and knelt down before them, laying his cape delicately out over his knees. When the gates opened, this was how I described it in my book:

From within the darkness, came a rearing, jolting black head, eyes focused, nostrils flaring, ears forward, a foot and a half of horns tapering to fine points above it. And behind it came a half-ton of pulsing muscle propelling it at a steady twenty-five miles an hour.

Fandi pulled the cape up in a single long smooth movement so it swung out in front of the speeding animal’s eyes, catching their attention, and then spun out to the side of his head, the bull following, finding only empty air with its questing horns.

Fandi smiled. Then he stood up.

Of course, this is a dramatic description of a bravura move and is more about thrill than art, but it had its effect.

Fandi, although popular to this day, has little art. The real artist on the sand is called José Tomás. This is man who once commanded a million Euros for a single afternoon in Barcelona in 2009, the year before bullfighting was banned there, where he faced six bulls solo. However, it was not the contest that was interesting. It was what he did with them: it was his style.

Within the three acts of this drama, the one the modern Spanish audience reveres most is the last (as, by the way, do the French, and Mexican and South American audiences.) Vivemos en la epocha de la muleta. We live in the epoch of the muleta: the smaller red cape – more a cloth than a cape – which is draped over a wooden stick, and offered to the bull as a lure.

It is by the slow solemn execution of the centuries old dance-book of passes with this cloth that the matador performs his art. By his unmoving rigidity, his tranquillity and the elegance of his gesture, contrasted with the surging, pulsing darkness of horn and muscle that brushes against the fabric of his ‘suit of lights’, he transmits emotion to the audience.

José Tomás in Nîmes, France in 2011 (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

Transmission and emotion are the key concepts here, and you will find them endlessly bandied about by the critics in the toros section of the Spanish newspapers among the theatre and opera reviews.

Ernest Hemingway was the probably the first to really come to grips with these ideas, partly because they only came into being the year before he first went to Spain in 1923. They were the invention of the Golden Age of bullfighting, the age of Belmonte and Joselito, until the latter was killed in the ring in 1920.

However, I promised myself that I wouldn’t talk about Hemingway, or that other great American aficionado Orson Welles whose ashes lie interred at a matador’s house near Ronda.

Which is fine as my early period of learning about bullfighting was as much influenced by Kenneth Tynan as Hemingway. Tynan, our greatest theatre critic, and co-founder of the National Theatre with Laurence Olivier, was the first to really make me see what he called “the slow, sad fury of the perfect bullfight.”

It was he who put it so neatly in his book Bull Fever when he said,

By profession, I am a drama critic; by conviction, a believer in the abolition of capital punishment; by birth, English. The reader may find it odd that a lover of the mimic deaths of stage tragedy, an enemy of judicial killing, and a native of a country which has immemorially detested those blood sports which involve personal hazard should have succumbed to bull fever, joined the afición, become a friend and apologist of the Spanish bullfight. And indeed it is odd. Or so I thought for many weeks after I saw my first corrida in 1950. But now the bullfight seems to me a logical extension of all the impulses my temperament holds – love of grace and valor, of poise and pride; and, beyond these, the capacity to be exhilarated by mastery of technique. No public spectacle in the world is more technical, offers less to the untaught observer, than a bullfight.

(1955)

So, after these brief glances at this quintessentially Spanish thing, through different sets of British eyes over the centuries, I thought I’d better end with a man voted Greatest Briton of all time, although how he is viewed in this club, where he was once a member, before resigning exactly a hundred years ago, I do not know.

The story goes like this: a stuffed bull’s head, solid black but with a white v on its forehead, arrived at No. 10 Downing Street in July 1945 with the following inscription.

This bull ‘Perdigon’, which came from my stud, was fought at Valencia by Manolete on the day of Victory. It was most noble in its ferocity and was born with the sign of victory on its brow. I present it to the great Mr. Winston Churchill, who with exemplary valour, nobility and humanity, wrought the victory which will save the world.

José Escobar

And this letter that was sent to Manolete in response that December:

My Dear Sir Manolete:

I have received some time ago the head of a magnificent toro, that was sent to me by the breeder Don José María Escobar. The toro had a distinct letter V in it’s forehead. They say that you killed this bull in Valencia on Victory Day.

I would like to thank you and for the generous act & expression of the friendship from Spain. I beg you to accept my best wishes for the happy ending for what must have been a difficult struggle.

Winston Churchill

One could pass it off as an amusing courtesy, were it not for the fact that when Manolete was killed by a Miura bull two years later, Churchill wrote a letter of condolence to his mother, containing the sentence:

I was moved when I received the noble trophy of your son’s superb skill in the bullring.

One wonders where, and if His Excellency could find out where, that bull head is today?

Thank you.

P.S. After His Excellency delivered his thanks as a response, The Right Honourable Nick Herbert, M.P., suggested to me the bull’s head and letter were both at Chartwell, Churchill’s home.

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/my-speech-on-the-bulls-before-the-spanish-ambassador-at-the-reform-club/feed/ 0 fiskeharrison Microsoft Word - Logo-1.docx Government of Spain logo Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Palma del Río, Spain, 2010 (Photo: Nicolás Haro) Plaza Mayor, Madrid Lord Byron by Richard Westall (Wikipedia) Into The Arena portada José Tomás in Nîmes, France in 2011 (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison) http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/welcome-2/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/welcome-2/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 17:00:28 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=2116 ]]>

This blog was begun in October ’08 to keep track of my research into the world of bullfighting following my essay for Prospect magazine on the topic. To read it, see the ‘Page’ tab on the right hand toolbar, alongside pages on the author, the structure of the bullfight, a more scientific piece on the nature of the Spanish fighting bull, pages on the ethics and the aesthetics of bullfighting, and my contact details. Two other posts I would mention here are this one on the popularity of bullfighting in Spain and the often quoted ‘Gallup’ polls, and also this one on the 533 famous professional bullfighters killed in the ring in the past three centuries.

Since then I have watched 1,000 bulls toreado (‘fight’ is not the word, there is nothing fair here), run the bulls myself in Pamplona, danced alongside Spain’s flamenco dancers, trained alongside her matadors in the arena with young bulls and killed a single bull myself in a ring in Córdoba and written the entire experience as a book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight.

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.

The book was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011 and listed as essential reading for both the Summer and Christmas in the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. As the reviewers said,

“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
“He did not expect to fall in love with bullfighting, but then he had his eyes opened by the beauty, dignity and art of the sport.” The Times
“Thrilling. An engrossing introduction to bullfighting.” Financial Times
“An informed piece of work on a subject about which we are all expected to have a view.”Daily Mail
“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 which 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
“Acknowledges the morally questionable nature of the bullfight. Interesting explorations of fear, bravery and drive.” League Against Cruel Sports
“A larger than life character. 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. Feel every failure, every success, every thrill.” Taurine Bibliophiles of America

They also say,

“Although Fiske-Harrison develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it.” (Daily Mail), “It’s to Fiske-Harrison’s credit that he never quite gets over his moral qualms about bullfighting.” (Financial Times), “Uneasy ethical dilemmas abound, not least the recurring question of how much suffering the animals are put through.” (Sunday Telegraph), “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.” (Mail on Sunday) and “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.”(Literary Review)

Website of the book here for full reviews.

What is on this blog is for those who have read the book and wish to go even further into the world of the bulls, which has now and forever become a part of my life.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/welcome-2/feed/ 22 fiskeharrison The Last Arena Logo Into The Arena cover http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/by-the-sword-my-column-in-takis-magazine/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/by-the-sword-my-column-in-takis-magazine/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 10:32:38 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=4244 ]]>

Despite what I said below, my column is to be titled ‘By The Sword’, for it’s wider scope. The pen is not always mightier than the sword and those who live by the sword don’t always die by it. (Espada, ‘sword’, is also the old word for a torero, professional or amateur, who kills. Matador de toros, as I explain in the post below, is a professional term I have never warranted.)

My first column under this sobriquet is on the dark and sanguine issue of abortion and homicide, called ‘The Difference Between Killing And Murder’. It is online here. The archive for the column is here.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Author in the ring

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/by-the-sword-my-column-in-takis-magazine/feed/ 1 fiskeharrison image Author in the ring http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/manzanares-in-the-maestranza-el-juli-in-hospital/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/manzanares-in-the-maestranza-el-juli-in-hospital/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:43:15 +0000 fiskeharrison https://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=4063 ]]>

José Mari Manzanares by Antalya Nall-Cain

I have written about the terrible reality of the corrida before. However, when my girlfriend and I went to La Maestranza yesterday for what we hoped would be the most interesting corrida of the entire feria de abril, the last thing I expected was to see Julián López Escobar, ‘El Juli’, carried out of the ring in front of me and rushed to intensive care.

Juli is, with the possible exception of Enrique Ponce, the most complete torero ‘on the sand’ in Spain today. At thirty years of age, he has been toreando fighting cattle for twenty-one years, sixteen of them professionally. A child prodigy, he stunned Mexico and later his native Spain with his surety in front of the bulls, and his phenomenal skill at reading the animal and developing even the most recalcitrant of beasts into a charging spectacle. Although when I researched for my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, in 2009 I was not quite so admiring of him, I still gave him his due. In 2010 I remember my teacher, the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura, and I agreeing that Juli did not transmit emotion, the very purpose of any artistic endeavour. However, since then I remember the Welsh aficionado Noel Chandler explaining to me how Juli was something almost unnatural in his breadth of knowledge, ‘an encyclopaedia of toreo’. And I remember seeing him in Pamplona in 2012, when all the crowd were busy celebrating the triumphant reappearance of the newly one-eyed Juan José Padilla, while he performed some of the most beautiful passes I have ever seen, seemingly for his own pleasure alone. Among the breeders of bulls he is known most of all for his aficion for the toros bravos themselves, which he spends months every year studying in the countryside. (I met him once in the Aero Club in Seville when he was being awarded a prize. He was charming and polite, although unnervingly young and humble for such a colossus in the plaza.)

So, given our current favourite torero’s (José Tomás doesn’t count), José Mari Manzanares, inability to repeat his stunning triumphs of the last two years when we saw him with six bulls last weekend, we had hoped that the presence of this Maestro would lead to some amazing faenas. However, the very first bull, with the brand of Toros de Cortés (which means Victorinao del Río, which means Juan Pedro Domecq), which had been unwilling to charge, and when charging had frequently stopped, or hooked his horns from side to side, somehow caught this technical virtuoso, and opened up his femoral artery with a 15cm deep horn wound and also knocked out three of his teeth. Had he been gored like this fifty years ago, he would have died.

(Photo: EFE / Julio Muñoz)

As you can see from the photo, he was swept out of the ring by the other bullfighters, Manzanares (on his right) then killed the bull. The other matador, Antonio Nazaré, a young Sevillano went on to have a great triumph with his second bull, receiving two ears, while Manazanares also did with his last, although he was denied the second ear by the presidenta for losing his muleta when he tried naturales on the left.

It is so strange that the finest toreo, and best toros, I have seen so far in the feria (which isn’t saying much) have been on the day that such a fine torero should come so close to losing his life. (And certainly losing his ability to torear the bulls of Miura on Sunday, something which was to be unique in having such a gran figura with such famously difficult bulls.) However, the one thing about the corrida de toros that we say time and time again, is how incredibly real it is. Men risk their lives for this, whether you like it or not….

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/manzanares-in-the-maestranza-el-juli-in-hospital/feed/ 1 fiskeharrison José Mari Manzanares by Antalya Nall-Cain (Photo: Julio Muñoz / EME) http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/my-column-for-takis-magazine-among-the-gold-and-the-gore-2/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/my-column-for-takis-magazine-among-the-gold-and-the-gore-2/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:18:07 +0000 fiskeharrison https://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=4013 ]]> Last night I filed my copy – and I fear as a result missed the birthday party of Don Tristán Ybarra n the feria – about bullfighting and reality television, the corrida and Made In Chelsea for my column in Taki’s magazine. It has been edited, as is always the case. However, this time I prefer the long version, not least as is is not quite so savage to dear Ollie Locke – a former flat mate of my girlfriend – and his amusing little book, Laid in Chelsea. After all, it was she who introduced him to reality television in the first place, while turning it down herself.

P.S. The photo in the blog post below is of us at the very corrida discussed from the Spanish newspapers.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Last night, while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marí Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded once again why I became so fascinated by the spectacle we ‘Anglo-Saxons’ incorrectly call bullfighting. (It is not a fight, but a highly structured drama centring on a ritual sacrifice. Nor is it a sport, but is conceived of as an art-form, unique in having a risk of death for the practitioner, but reviewed between the ballet and theatre in the newspapers and spoken of in terms of its aesthetics rather than its athletics.)

My girlfriend, a recent convert but still possessed of strong and valid doubts about the activity, asked what it was amongst the gold and the gore that draws me back to the plaza de toros time and time again. The answer I gave was the absolute reality of the corrida. As an art-form, it represents man’s struggle with death, and how it should be best faced, which is with a striking and elegant defiance. However, it is the only art-form that also is what it represents, which is a man standing alone on the sand with an animal intent on killing him. And kill they do: 533 noted professional toreros have died in the past three centuries, and a far greater number number of less famous ones and amateurs. My first instructor in how to torear, the matador Juan José Padilla, almost joined their ranks two years ago when a bull removed his eye and a chunk of his skull. Needless to say he was back in the ring five months later, sans depth perception, a triumphant return which I covered for GQ magazine here.

I come to Seville whenever I can to see these exceptionally brave men stand in front of these beautiful bulls, the best time of year being now as the town prepares for its annual celebration of the death of winter, the feria de abril, ‘April Fair’. This year I am not here on holiday, but have come to meet with another matador, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez, about whom I am co-producing and writing a documentary. Cayetano has risen to fame and riches through risking his life in this way, a risk he knows all too well. His father, the matador Paquirri, was killed by a bull when Cayetano was just seven years old.

Whatever one thinks of the ethics of injuring and killing an animal as part of a public spectacle – personally I find it no less reprehensible than killing one at a third the age and after a far worse life for meat I do not medically need to eat – there is an undeniable honour and glamour in earning your status and fortune by dancing with death.

Which is why it stands in such stark contrast to what passes for honour and glamour in my home country of Great Britain. I say this having just attended the book launch of an acquaintance who had brought out his memoirs at the ripe old age of 26. I say memoirs, it is more accurately described as a travelogue of his sexual adventures, something made clear by its title Laid In Chelsea. It is currently at number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list. The reason for this literary success is because the author, Ollie Locke, is famous for being in a reality television show called Made In Chelsea.

Now, I must admit up front my envy at his book sales. My own travelogue Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight didn’t make it onto the bestseller lists, even after it was erroneously but flatteringly shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award. (See earlier comments about the corrida not being a sport.)

The fact that having your life filmed and broadcast, and then writing about your carnal exploits, can bring wealth and glory neatly sums up so much that is wrong with modern Britain, a generalisation that extends to our Saxon cousins in the US. Spain may be financially bankrupt, but at least it isn’t morally so.

I should add here that the book is actually quite readable, although that is helped by the fact that I know some of the people in it. Indeed, I’m even related to one of them. The author himself, Ollie Locke, is a witty and charming young man, with the bizarrely marketable talent of being good at being himself. However, he is also the sort of person – I’m sure he won’t mind me remarking on this – that had to have explained to him for an hour why the girl to whom he lost his virginity might not like that event written up and published.

Having the sexual ethics of an alley cat to one side, the reason I cannot watch Made In Chelsea, despite having grown up there and knowing some of the cast, is that no one on it ever does, or has ever done, anything worthy of note. It is a parade of moderately good looking people having rather stilted conversations about one another’s utterly irrelevant and pedestrian personal lives. I know these people and find it unspeakably dull; God knows what anyone else sees in it. Fiction was invented to get away from exactly this sort of tedium.

However, when people use that oxymoronic and false phrase ‘Reality Television’, it is not Made In Chelsea, or Big Brother, or any of those other monstrosities that spring to mind. It is the television footage of Cayetano’s father, being tossed by that bull in 1984, and then the footage afterwards of him in the hospital, fully conscious, reassuring and calming the panicking surgeons as they struggle in vain to stop his life from haemorrhaging out onto the bed sheets where he lay. That was how Paquirri justified his salary and his celebrity, by paying the ultimate price, and facing it with a courage and grace at the end that beggers belief.

That his son – both sons in fact – should follow in his shoes, makes him truly deserving of having his life told as a story, on film and in print. Something Ernest Hemingway felt similarly about when he wrote the articles about Cayetano’s grandfather Antonio Ordóñez that were posthumously published as the book The Dangerous Summer. And when he fictionalised his 1924 encounter with Cayetano’s great grandfather, also called Cayetano, in Pamplona as The Sun Also Rises. Some people are deserving of recognition and others not. The British and American inability to distinguish between them is at the heart of our ethical, and aesthetic decline.

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/my-column-for-takis-magazine-among-the-gold-and-the-gore-2/feed/ 1 fiskeharrison image http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/la-real-maestranza-de-caballeria-de-sevilla/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/la-real-maestranza-de-caballeria-de-sevilla/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:40:42 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=4005 ]]>

ABC de Sevilla

PUERTA DEL PRINCÍPE: SÁBADO DE PREFERÍA
[Gate of the Prince: Saturday of the Pre-Feria]

13/04/2013

Máxima expectación y rostros conocidos en el encierro en solitario de José Maria Manzanares
[High expectations and familiar faces at the bullfight of José Maria Manzanares as sole matador]

El torero y escritor inglés Alexander Fiske-Harrison con su novia La. Hon. Antalya Nall-Cain
(Photo: Mario Niebla del Toro / ABC de Sevilla)

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/la-real-maestranza-de-caballeria-de-sevilla/feed/ 0 fiskeharrison image El torero y escritor inglés Alexander Fiske-Harrison con su novia La. Hon. Antalya Nall-Cain (Photo: Mario Niebla del Toro / ABC de Sevilla) http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/a-dedication-to-seville/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/a-dedication-to-seville/#comments Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:03:19 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=3946 ]]> Ten years ago, I arrived in Seville with a broken engagement behind me and a career as investment banker in front of me. I had come to Andalusia to recover from the horrors of the one and prepare myself for the horrors of the other. I had been to the city a few times – I discovered it on the way back from an early attempt to ‘be an author’ in the Sahara desert – and seen a few corridas de toros, that we English wrongly call bullfights, as though it were a sporting contest rather than what it is, a scripted drama culminating in a ritual sacrifice. The Spanish word for the activity, toreo is as well translated by the word ‘bullfighting’ as flamenco would be by ‘heel-dancing’.

(We had the word bullfight and its cognates sitting idle in our vocabulary since we banned our own grim ‘sport’ of bull-baiting with dogs, which gave us our national symbol, the bull-dog, as Spain was given its, the toro bravo by the corrida, hence it is also called the fiesta nacional. For discussion of its current popularity and the oft-quoted ‘Gallup’ polls, see this post. On the ethics of the corrida, see this one.)

The corridas confused and fascinated me – when done well, they were beautiful, when badly a sin: they appeared to exist on a moral precipice – while the atmosphere of Seville – the buildings and people so clearly European when seen on my way back from Africa, yet somehow alien when arrived at from London – had a similar effect. And underneath both was the soul-twisting lament of the flamenco voice with its dark rhythms that pulse like the inevitable approach of death.

Author, Algerian border, 1998

So I came back to Seville in 2003, staying at the Hotel Alfonso XII according to my copy of that poet of flamenco, toreo and Andalusia, Federico García Lorca. My copy of the aficionado’s bible, Ernest Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon, charts my progress through the town to what was the bullfighter’s hotel in those days, the Colón, and on east to Cordoba.

Now, ten years later, I am coming back to a different Seville as a different person. Spain’s economy, like a bull stumbling after a bad wound from the picador’s lance, is being watched by the world to see if it will get up to charge again – something even the bull does not know – or will have to be replaced with something different. I, however, have moved from my seat in the audience to the callejón, the alleyway around the ring where the toreros stand.

After that first visit in 2003, I came back a few times, most notably for the feria de abril, the ‘April Fair’, of ’07, when I saw the matador El Cid torear a bull of Victorino Martín so well that I based an entire essay for Prospect magazine on it. As a result of that, I was sent back to Seville to write a book on toreo, and it was then that first met a series of people who would both populate my book and change my life.

This history of a taurine tribe

The Dedication of a Friend

Among the most important of these are the family that bred the only bull I have ever killed with a sword.

I first met Enrique Moreno de la Cova in the Spring of 2009, as I described in chapter five of my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, and he invited me to come and face his cattle along with the now one-eyed – and world famous – matador Juan José Padilla. Enrique and his elder brother Félix had inherited the ‘mark’ (literally a ‘brand’) of cattle called Saltillo, now more famous as an encaste, a ‘strain’ of the breed that is the toro bravo. The original Saltillos still exist, though. (They are named after their first owner, the Marquess of Saltillo, from whom Enrique’s grandfather, Félix Moreno Ardanuy purchased them in 1918.) However, their decline was noted as long ago as 1937, when the matador and father of modern toreo, Juan Belmonte remarked in his memoirs, “What has happened to the breeds of Parladé, Saltillo and so many others?”

When I faced the Saltillos, I had only been in the ring once before – with the far simpler and smoother cattle of Fuente Ymbro with Padilla and our friend Adolfo Suárez Illana, son of the founding Prime Minister of Spanish Democracy – and the account of my injuries on their horns is fully recorded in chapter six of the book.

Matadors Finito de Córdoba & Juan José Padilla give a lesson(Photo: Nicolas Haro)

For me the Saltillos are Seville, and so I was sad to hear from Enrique that he and his brother no longer had them. However, they remain within the family, having moved to a cousin, José Joaquín Moreno Silva. One of my greatest memories of my two years living in Spain is an afternoon spent with the Saltillos at their ranch Miravalles under the tutelage of my friend, the former matador Eduardo Dávila Miura (whose grandfather bred the most famous bulls of all, including the one that killed Manolete). We then returned to the former ranch of the Saltillos, La Vega, with all three grandsons of Don Félix, who, along with Maestro Dávila Miura, inscribed a copy of their forebear’s philosophical musings on the bulls.

Now, I must pack for my return to Seville, where I shall be watching corridas with Enrique, drinking at La Fresquita with him, his wife the artist Cristina Ybarra (who has an excellent blog here) her brother Tristán and his aficionada pura wife Maria O’Neill, joking with Adolfo and Padilla as he dresses before going to torear in the Maestranza, and returning to the ring myself with Eduardo.

 

Spring is here, and Seville, she has not abandoned me .

(The heraldic motto ‘NO8DO’ is to be found all over Seville, from the drain covers to the police cars. The skein of wool in its centre represented by an ’8′ is called a madeja in Spanish, so it reads, “no madeja do”, a play on the words no me ha dejado, ‘she has not abandoned me.” These were reputedly said by King Alfonso X when the city remained loyal to him against his son, Sancho IV of Castile.)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

P.S. Obviously, I never became an investment banker, although in a strange twist of fate and friendship Enrique and Cristina’s eldest son did come and work for a summer with my father in the City doing exactly that, exchanging Saltillo for Fiske & Co PLC.

Enrique Moreno de la Cova and the author en route to the bullring of his Saltillos (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/a-dedication-to-seville/feed/ 3 fiskeharrison Author, Algerian border, 1998 (Photo: Camille Natta) Lorca dedicación Hemingway dedicación This history of a taurine tribe The Dedication of a Friend vaquilla-flies1 Filosofía taurina portada Filosofía taurina dedicación 038 Nicolas of Xander and Enrique http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/hemingways-fiesta-condemned-to-being-very-good/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/hemingways-fiesta-condemned-to-being-very-good/#comments Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:30:15 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=3872 ]]>

Today sees the final performances of the West End show, Hemingway’s Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises). If you have not been to see it, good luck on getting tickets now – I was told by the producer ten days ago that they only had ten tickets left for evenings performances, and a few more for matinées (there is one today.) There’s always a chance: details are here.

I very much like the cast and crew. I first met with them at the best tapas bar in London, Capote y Toros on the Old Brompton Road, to ‘assist’ the production as detailed in The Daily Telegraph.

7 February 2012

by Tim Walker

Curtain also rises

Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel will attend the first night of Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) at the Trafalgar Studios in Whitehall on Thursday night.

The cast of the show, which is based on his first novel, about bullfighting, were given tips on the Spanish “art” by Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an Old Etonian, who trained as a matador.

“I tried to convey the essence of what it is to be a bullfighter,” says Fiske-Harrison, who is courting Antalya Nall-Cain, the daughter of Lord Brocket.

I met them again at the First Night after-party at Boyd’s Bar in the old Grand Hotel and at the same place venue last Friday to listen to their excellent on-stage supporting jazz band Trio Farouche.

So I was, in some ways at least, happy when The Spectator told me they couldn’t fit my review in. The production has had largely excellent reviews, as well as selling out. However, I am most inclined to agree with Michael Billington’s review. It is worth saying that we saw the play the same night, and even discussed it before, during the interval and after. His award of three stars seems about fair, and not just because that was the same number my own last venture on stage got in Billington’s review.

Anyway, given that it is now far too late for any negativity in my piece to have an effect, I hope the producers, director, cast and crew take this in the spirit of honest appraisal it was intended. After all, being “condemned to being merely very good” is still very good, n’est-ce pas?

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

From left to right (foreground): Cayetano Ordóñez – ‘Niño de la Palma’, Ernest Hemingway & Cayetano’s son, Antonio Ordóñez

The Sun Is Now Set

I first read Fiesta, Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel published as The Sun Also Rises in the US, in 2008 while researching for a magazine article on bullfighting for Prospect magazine (online here). At the time I was also rehearsing to act in a play I had written in a theatre in London’s West End. Which was why I got talking to another cast of actors in a nearby pub who told me they were ‘workshopping’ a stage adaptation of Fiesta the Old Vic.

The vagaries of a life are strange, and as the scenery came down on my play, and I was once again unemployed, my literary agent suggested I turn my magazine article to a book on bullfighting and so I set of to Spain. During my two years, I went from spectator to participant, briefly becoming a torero myself.

Since publishing that book, Into The Arena, I have returned to Spain many times, sometimes to run with the bulls in Pamplona (as described in The Spectator last July) – often alongside Ernest’s grandson, John Hemingway – sometimes to get back in the training ring (no animals harmed) alongside matadors like the great Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez – great grandson of Cayetano Ordóñez, on whom the matador in Fiesta, Pedro Romero is based. (In fact, the book was originally drafted as a non-fiction short-story under the title ‘Cayetano Ordóñez’.)

It was because of this ever deepening connection to that novel that, when I first heard that the director whose troop I had drunk with in 2008 was now staging a full-blown production of Fiesta at the Trafalgar Studios in London, I felt interested enough to get in touch and ask how their actor who would represent Romero was learning the external rigours and internal workings that are universal in those who kill bulls for a profession.

There is more, of course, to fighting a bull than physical elegance and inner confidence bordering on hubris, but not to have those would be to fail to represent one of the things Hemingway adored above all others: the deportment of those who possess “grace under pressure” and thus, in the words of the novel itself, “live life all the way up.”

They told me they had a “great choreographer”, to which my response was along the lines of flamenco and bullfighting being distant relatives at best. Whatever I said, I found myself invited for a drink with the director Alex Helfrecht, and the actors playing Jake Barnes, a Paris-based journalist and ‘deep’ aficionado based on Hemingway himself, and Pedro Romero.

I must admit that my confidence was not inspired during that glass of Rioja. The actors seemed very much actors – preternaturally youthful, fascinated by surface details and lacking the natural authority Hemingway imbued these two characters with. I explained that professional toreros were men who could say without a sense of irony, or even a hint of the awareness of the hyperbole, that to fight bulls is like talking to God. And they can say this because when they stand in the ring and the ‘Gates of Fear’ open and half a ton of bull charges out making the ground itself bounce, and the only sound they can hear is the relentless rolling thunder of the bull’s breath, these men dig their feet into the sand, stiffen their legs, and summon the horns toward them.

Whatever one thinks of the ethics of the corrida de toros, the 533 notable professional toreros (including Cayetano the Younger’s father) – and God knows how many unknowns and amateurs – who have died in the past three centuries clearly show the risks, and the concomitant fortitude, both physical and psychological, of those who live with those risks. That is a hell of a hard thing to fake on stage.

Despite my misgivings, when it came to the play itself, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Jack Holden nailed the arrogance and youth of a matador arriving in the spotlight, Gideon Turner caught the jaded bitterness of the wounded writer, Josie Taylor was poignantly truthful in her emotion as the self-condemned shallow lush that is Lady Brett Ashley while Jye Frasca suitably alternated weak and bullying as the fist-happy Robert Cohn. Even the jazz from Trio Farouche, who doubled as extras on set, were pretty damned good.

However, during a chance conversation in the foyer, Michael Billington – the longest serving critic in British theatre- suggested I look at the book again. And when Hemingway’s other grandchild, the actress Mariel, remarked how “bold” the adaptation was at the Press Night party, I returned to the original text.

Now, I am not a fanatic for accuracy or orthodoxy. (One of my favourite adaptations of one of my favourite novels is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now from Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness.) I don’t mind that the bullfighting was nothing like real bullfighting and that the matador hadn’t the faintest idea how to move. Nor do I object to the removal of characters due to the small stage and smaller budget. These were not why I pictured Hemingway’s bones slowly turning over and over as though on a spit in his Idaho grave.

My problem was that the adaptation was wrong – not bad – simply wrong. Fiesta is an inherently tragic novel in a way which only Hemingway knew how to write, and from the very first the characters manifest that. For example, Jake’s active dislike for his ‘friend’ Cohn which appears on page one of the novel is removed from the play, as are Brett’s multiple lovers and first husband, (along with the general tone of anti-Semitism the characters slide into when Cohn misbehaves.) In order to have more happen on the stage, filling the now orthodox dramatic convention that a ‘scene’ must have an objective and an obstacle to overcome to get to it, the heartbreakingly sad fact that Jake and Brett have tried to be lovers before is dropped. The gain is a little stage nudity –surely no longer transgressive or ‘edgy’ in 2013 – the loss is the seamless progression of the tragedy from beginning to end. In the urge to have things happen, the essential meaning of the events themselves are lost.

Hemingway’s own narrative structure, combined with his iceberg theory of writing – “the dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one eighth of it being above water” – means that his scenes begin with the fact that they are going nowhere writ large upon them, which just is their tragedy and that of their protagonists. Only by doing this can he then slowly reveal to his audience, almost sadistically, quite how much worse everything is than you had originally thought. Which is why the play, by lacking the courage in the genius of its original author, is condemned to be merely very good. Which is the West End at the moment, is quite enough for some. However, some of us want more.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison and Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (Photo: Nicolás Haro)

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/hemingways-fiesta-condemned-to-being-very-good/feed/ 0 fiskeharrison Fiesta-eflyer The_Daily_Telegraph Hemingway & Ordonez padre Alexander Fiske-Harrison and Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez (Photo: Nicolas Haro) http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/it-is-illegal-to-touch-the-bulls/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/it-is-illegal-to-touch-the-bulls/#comments Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:00:51 +0000 fiskeharrison https://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=3837 ]]>

El Juli, José Marí Manzanares, Curro Vázquez and, behind, the empresario Simon Casas, yesterday in the Congress. (Photo: Luis Sevillano/El País)

Yesterday, the lower chamber of the Spanish parliament voted on the matter brought before them by 590,000 signatures on a petition to make Los Toros Bien de Interés Cultural, protected cultural interest. Given that the vote was a landslide, 180 votes against 40, with the 107 socialist congressmen abstaining, it seems a given that the senate will nod it through, passing it into law, and, among other things, federally overturning the vastly, and distortingly, over-reported regional ban on corridas de toros, novilladas and rejoneo in the autonomous community of Catalonia which came into effect in 2011.

All I can say in this brief post, is that this is yet another step forward for animal welfare in Europe. And if you want to know why, read the post on this blog – you can find it on the list of posts on the right – about how bullfighting is not a moral wrong.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/it-is-illegal-to-touch-the-bulls/feed/ 2 fiskeharrison 20130213-185006.jpg http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/takis-magazine-barnaby-conrad-ernest-hemingway-and-los-toros/ http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/takis-magazine-barnaby-conrad-ernest-hemingway-and-los-toros/#comments Sun, 07 Apr 2013 14:30:03 +0000 fiskeharrison http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/?p=3865 ]]>

Barnaby Conrad in his San Francisco bar, ‘El Matador’ (Photo: Neils Mortensen)

I have written an ‘appraisal’ of Barnaby Conrad for Taki’s Magazine (I prefer the term to ‘obituary’, as it is marked. It is certainly far from the eulogy I wrote for my friend Bomber below.)

Conrad was an early influence on me, being one of the taurine authors I read between Summer 2003 – when I read Ernest Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon – and Summer 2008 – when my own first article on the bulls was published in Prospect magazine (see the ‘Page’ menu on the right). In fact, I think his bestselling fictionalised account of the death of Manolete, Matador, was the second book I read on the subject, followed by the English theatre critic – and co-founder of our National Theatre with Sir Laurence Olivier – Kenneth Tynan’s Bull Fever. Both Hemingway and Tynan are formidable, and in this case overwheming, acts to follow or precede. Sadly, I never got to meet Don Bernabé, despite an invitation from a mutual friend to do so last year. Now I never will.

This article marks my debut in ‘Takimag‘, an online magazine founded six years ago by Panagiotis ‘Taki’ Theodoracopulos, the well-known paleoconservative and writer (Among many, many other things, Taki has written the ‘High Life’ column for The Spectator since 1977, for most of those years twinned with the ‘Low Life’ column of the great Geoffrey Bernard.) I have been invited to contribute a bi-weekly column. God knows what my next one will be on…

Anyway, my initial contribution on this other bon viveur, gentleman-amateur and author, Barnaby Conrad can be accessed by clicking here.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Barnaby Conrad standing in front of the poster that lists him and the greatest matador in history, Juan Belmonte, fighting on the same ticket

]]> http://fiskeharrison.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/takis-magazine-barnaby-conrad-ernest-hemingway-and-los-toros/feed/ 0 fiskeharrison Barnaby Conrad in his San Francisco bar, 'El Matador' (Photo: Neils Mortensen Barnaby Conrad standing in front of the poster that lists him and the greatest matador in history, Juan Belmonte, fighting on the same ticket