# Picturegoing Eyewitness accounts of viewing pictures Page: Feed: --- ## [Seeing Stars](https://picturegoing.com/?p=3711) _2026-05-04 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Alan Bennett, extract from Alan Bennett, extract from ‘Seeing Stars’, London Review of Books, vol. 24 no. 1, 3 January 2002, pp. 12-16, reproduced in Untold Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 170-171 Text: I had no notion as a child that going to the pictures was a kind of education, or that Read More ## [Little Wilson and Big God](https://picturegoing.com/?p=1963) _2025-07-17 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), pp. 30-31 Text: At the age of six a social function was imposed upon me that had everything to do with entertainment, though not necessarily of the comic kind. On Queen’s Road there were two cinemas – the Rex and the Electric. They faced Read More ## [David Lean: A Biography](https://picturegoing.com/?p=3397) _2024-11-22 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1997 \[orig. 1996\]) p. 203 Text: I was making GREAT EXPECTATIONS down at Rochester when the first print came through \[of Brief Encounter\] … I suggested we ask the local theatre if they would run a preview. Rochester was a pretty tough town in Read More ## [It took nine tailors](https://picturegoing.com/?p=2900) _2024-11-16 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Adolphe Menjou and M.M. Musselman, It took nine tailors (New York/Toronto: Whittlesey House, 1948), pp. 16-17 Text: Perhaps the years have added glamour and magnitude to my recollection of the Casino, for I still think of it as a Taj Mahal among restaurants. I have dined in some of the finest eating places in Read More ## [Journey Without Maps](https://picturegoing.com/?p=3721) _2024-11-10 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: Vintage, 2006 – orig. pub. 1936), pp. 15-17 Text: The cinema in Tenerife was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the Read More ## [Little Wilson and Big God](https://picturegoing.com/?p=2738) _2024-10-09 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 55 Text: Still, social mobility is built into women and may be an aspect of their biology. Madge remained refined, though ill-informed, and she dressed elegantly in the bosomless style of the day, going off to her stenography in a cloche hat and Read More ## [Seeing Stars](https://picturegoing.com/?p=3732) _2024-08-25 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Alan Bennett, extract from ‘Seeing Stars’, London Review of Books, vol. 24 no. 1, 3 January 2002, pp. 12-16, reproduced with slight emendations in Untold Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 160-173 Text: In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least Read More ## [Berlin Childhood around 1900](https://picturegoing.com/?p=3885) _2024-07-25 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland), Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Cambridge, Mass./London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 42-44 Text: One of the great attractions of the travel scenes found in the Imperial Panorama was that it did not matter where you began the cycle. Because the viewing screen, with places to Read More ## [The Cinema in the Arena](https://picturegoing.com/?p=4088) _2024-07-09 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Extract from Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), ‘The Cinema in the Arena’, in Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), pp. 38-40. Originally published in German in Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 September 1925 Text: The arena of Nîmes holds celebrated bullfights some afternoons, but in the evenings it Read More ## [Countdown to Getting Paid (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/fl3kMkP9zlef) _2024-07-09 · **Sponsored**_ Create a shareable wallet timer — deposits buy back time and pay debt down ## [Yesterday’s Sunshine](https://picturegoing.com/?p=720) _2024-06-21 · Luke McKernan_ Source: Verne Morgan, Yesterday’s Sunshine: Reminiscences of an Edwardian Childhood (Folkestone: Bailey Brothers and Swinfen, 1974), pp. 122-126 Text: The Moving Pictures, as we called them, first came to Bromley when I was about seven. They made their début at the Central Hall, and the performances took place on Friday nights. There were two houses, Read More