Alexander Fiske-Harrison was born in London in 1976, the youngest of three brothers. He grew up between London and rural East Anglia. His middle brother Jules William Fiske Harrison was, according to Jules’s childhood friend Giles Coren writing in The Times, “a famously skilled and fearless skiier” and was killed in an accident in Zermatt, Switzerland in 1988.
Alexander was educated at the universities of Oxford and London, beginning in Biological Sciences after a lifelong fascination with animals, joining the World Wildlife Fund (as it then was) in 1988 and Greenpeace in 1994. He went on to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics and then the Philosophy and History of Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, as well as a Master of Arts and a Master of Science. He studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York when Marlon Brando was its chairman.
He wrote for the Oxford student newspaper The Word on literature, and went on to write on literature, drama, the arts, science and philosophy for The Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect and Frieze magazines. He says his favourite piece was visiting Georgia State University’s Language Research Centre in Atlanta to spend time with Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the bonobo Kanzi and the other great apes housed there. He wrote about his experience, the philosophy and science of ape language research and its bearing on animal welfare in a cover-page essay for the FT ‘Weekend’ (reprinted here). He concluded that,
“It is only by fully grasping the intellectual capacities of the apes that we will be able to provide them with even rudimentary welfare standards.
[For] the great danger now is that great apes are kept alive merely to prevent the species going extinct, housed for generations in a prison-like environment that could produce mental deterioration leading to full mental disorder.”
He said his most informative piece was following him serving as a judge on the Loebner Prize, the largest international contest of Artificial Intelligence, and wrote about that and the philosophy of AI, Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein in a commentary essay for The TLS (available to subscribers here). His conclusions were technical but wide-ranging,
“The truth of the matter is hard to come by. Sufficiently good simulations of humans will inevitably come, and when they do, we may end up with no choice but to concede to their consciousness. One of the problems of consciousness is that we “identified” people and certain animals as conscious long before we “knew” (in the linguistic sense) they were so. Now scientific enquiry begs us to name our conditions for identifying something as conscious, and the trouble is that we do not really have any…. Wittgenstein hit this nail on the head with the comment, “My attitude towards him was an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” For if it was mere opinion, or a piece of ordinary knowledge, it could be disconfirmed, which our thoughts on the consciousness of others can not… “
As a student, he won the Oxford New Writing Prize with his play The Death Of An Atheist, which was performed at the Wadham Theatre. He also acted in Cuppers, the Oxford University Drama Society’s annual festival, in W. B. Yeat’s The Only Jealousy Of Emer, directed by his friend Hugh Dancy. His professional debut as an actor was in the Jacobean play The Second Maiden’s Tragedy at the Hackney Empire in London. His West End debut, as actor and playwright, was The Pendulum (website here) in 2008. Michael Billington, writing in The Guardian, awarded it three stars and said:
“Fiske-Harrison has clearly done his homework. The author himself plays the disintegrating hero with the right poker-backed irascibility;…it is refreshing to find a new play that gets away from bedsit angst… one comes away with the sensation of having seen an accomplished historical play.”
He has also acted in independent film and theatre in the US, Germany and Italy (photo below).
In 2008, Prospect magazine published an essay of Fiske-Harrison’s about Spanish bullfighting, drawing on his studies in animal behaviour, moral philosophy, drama and the half dozen bullfights he had witnessed over the years (reprinted here). Noting that,
“There is something ironic about British families sitting down to watch wildebeests eviscerated by lions on Big Cat Diary after a nice joint of roast beef while deploring their Spanish cousins when they are sitting down to watch a bullfight.”
He ended with the open conclusion that,
“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.”
The article became the most commented on and controversial that the magazine ever ran and it was reprinted from India to Ohio and he was interviewed from Al-Jazeera to CNN.
As a result, Fiske-Harrison moved to Spain in late 2008 to investigate further to come to some sort conclusion on the subject. He wrote up his research on his blog, ‘The Last Arena: In Search Of The Spanish Bullfight’ (website here). By August 2009 the Daily Telegraph was reporting,
“Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a 33-year-old writer and actor, says he has been signed up by Profile to write a book, Into the Arena, about his exploits as an aspiring toreador.
‘I’ve been learning to cape bulls with Adolfo Suárez Illana, the son of Spain’s first post-Franco prime minister,’ he says.
His book is described by the publisher as ‘an involving exploration of a controversial subject’.
Peter Carson, the acquiring editor, adds: ‘Bullfighting is one of those subjects that attracts excellent writers: from Kenneth Tynan and Ernest Hemingway to A L Kennedy.’”
At this time, The Times described him as “the bullfighter-philosopher.” Following this, the newspaper sent Giles Coren to follow up on his article about his late friend and he travelled to Spain to witness first-hand Jules’s brother’s work. He wrote a 9,000-word travelogue of that visit in The Times magazine on Boxing Day 2009:
“It’s very strange to meet Jules’s little brother now, aged 32. He was 11 when I last him, standing rigidly next to his parents and surviving brother at the entrance to Westminster Abbey as hundreds of people filed into Jules’s memorial service.”
Speaking with the bullfighter Adolfo Suárez Illana, as he and Fiske-Harrison prepared to enter a bullring for a training session, Coren asked,
“I ask Adolfo if what Xander is about to do is dangerous.
‘Of course,’ he says, as if I am a moron. ‘It is very dangerous.’
How dangerous?
‘He can die.’
Oh. Is he a good bullfighter?
‘He is one of the bravest men that I have seen in the ring.’ says Adolfo. ‘Because when you have the technique, you know you have that to fall back on. And he does not have this.’
Wow, brave because essentially clueless. Very British. Very Charge of the Light Brigade. Very scary.”
The resulting book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight was published in the UK on May 26th, 2011 (website here). The reviewers said,
“Complex and ambitious, compelling and lyrical.” Mail on Sunday *****
“An engrossing introduction to Spain’s ‘great feast of art and danger’.” Sunday Times
“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
“An informative and breathtaking volume of gonzo journalism” The Herald
“Particularly good. He transposes the spectacle into words with great success, conveying the drama of the corrida with eloquence and precision..” Literary Review
“An entertaining account [which] seeks a demonstration of the values which distinguish bullfighting from butchery.” The Spectator
Fiske-Harrison is a producer at Mephisto Productions (website here), which is currently developing as co-producer a feature-length cinema documentary on bullfighting.
He also set up The Pamplona Post (website here), following his return to the city to run with the bulls in 2011.
Fiske-Harrison, far right, running with a Torrestrella bull, Pamplona July 7th, 2011 (Photo: REUTERS/Joseba Etxaburu Reprinted Diario de Navarra, Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, New York TImes)
