Brian Lee – författare

A history of central Cardiff

Drawing on his detailed knowledge of the city’s history, in this book Brian Lee takes the reader on a pictorial journey of the Cardiff of yesteryear. A fascinating selection of archive postcards has been chosen to reflect the changing fashions and pastimes in the city. They also show changes in types of transport, and the developing character of streets and districts as they took on the form that is familiar today. Informative captions accompany the images to relate the history of the people and buildings. Including chapters on the castle, civic centre, city-centre streets, parks, religion, transport, the docks, leisure and sport and also the 1909 Pageant of Wales, this book is sure to enthral anyone who knows and loves this vibrant city.

Following the success of Yesterday’s Cardiff, Brian Lee has returned, accompanied by his daughter Amanda Harvey, to take the reader on a further pictorial journey through the Cardiff of yesteryear. Drawing on their detailed knowledge of the city’s history, the pair have collected a diverse selection of images, which give a fascinating insight into how life has changed in Cardiff over the last century. Packed with over 200 charming photographs, Yesterday’s Cardiff Revisited includes scenes of Cardiff’s docks, historic pubs and visits from royalty. Also featuring nostalgic snapshots of sporting moments and schooldays – including a picture of the young Dame Shirley Bassey with her classmates – this book is sure to captivate everyone interested in this vibrant city and its past.

Brian Lee's study of American fiction from 1865 to 1940 draws on a wealth of material by, amongst others, Twain, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Though the works of these writers have been closely scrutinised by postwar critics in Europe and America, few attempts have yet been made to utilise the new critical approaches and theories in the service of literary history. Brian Lee does so in this book, relating the writers of the period - both major and minor - to its patterns of immense economic, social and intellectual change.

T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism is often described as ‘the criticism of a poet’. Mr Lee asks what happens if we take that description seriously and read the criticism as if it was as much the expression of the man, it its way, as the poetry; continuous with the poetry and the preoccupations of the poetry. This essay in interpretation is an attempt to follow out such a programme and to account for the contradictions and seemingly discrepant utterances that Eliot himself left unexplained. The opening chapter offers an outline of Eliot’s main ‘theories’ and the connection between them, and subsequent chapters deal with critical approaches to Eliot; ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and impersonality; Eliot’s ideas on personality; and the relation between individual personality and society.

Horse racing may be famously known as the 'sport of kings' but, in the pursuit of prize money and getting one over the bookies, it also has attained a notoriety for some underhand, corrupt and downright illegal practices. Horse racing in Wales is not exempt from these dodgy dealings and on many occasions has led the way in it's ingenuity to devise jaw-dropping cons and cunning deceptions. In The Scams, Scandals and Gambles of Horseracing in Wales, Brian Lee, the veteran and highly regarded Welsh racing correspondent has, for the first time, compiled a comprehensive collection of true stories that reveals Welsh racing's most notorious crooks, loveable rouges and most infamous scams, including: The Oyster Maid affair, when a great gambling coup engineered at Tenby in 1927 nearly put paid to horse racing in Wales and was said by the Queen Mother's jockey, Dick Francis, to have been "the most bitterly resented betting coup National Hunt racing has ever known". The astounding story of Am I Blue's when, in 2010, a four-year-old filly, owned and trained by Aberkenfig's Delyth Thomas, romped home at Hereford after being backed from 25-1 to 5-1, despite having woeful form.As one reporter put it: 'There was outrage in some quarters and amusement in others.' The elaborate switching of horses and the cutting of the telegraph wires at Bath races in 1953 which saw well-know Cardiff bookie Gomer Charles jailed for 2 years for fraud after his syndicate place GBP100k worth of bets on a 'ringer' racehorse that won at 20-1. The Scandals and Gambles of Horseracing in Wales includes stories both from racing 'under rules' but also from point-to-point, known as racing 'between-the-flags', as well as flapping (unlicensed racing). The stories in this enthralling book, in which the reader will meet many of the rogues of the turf, are informative as well as fascinating and will appeal to not only horse racing fans but also readers of true crime.