March 28, 2026 – David Chase is shedding new light on the deeply personal origins of The Sopranos, revealing that the groundbreaking series was, in part, a way to process painful experiences with his mother.
As his mobster-in-therapy masterpiece is named the best TV of the century, its creator says he was just thrashing out his own issues with his domineering, suffocating mother
Emma Brockes
Monday 16 September 2018
The first image David Chase had in mind for the show that became The Sopranoswas a closeup of Tony Soprano opening his eyes, “waking up for the day”. That scene ended up falling later in the pilot. The opening scene, as any of the show’s superfans will happily inform you, watches Tony eyeing up a sculpture in a therapist’s waiting room with baffled rage. The show is 20 years old this year, and if that makes you feel ancient, “think how I feel,” says creator David Chase, who, at 74, is ferocious looking, with beady black eyes and the intense, long-suffering air of the protagonist whose name has become synonymous with his own.
Will the great TV writer ever top his mega hit? He talks us through his new series about the CIA’s attempts to weaponise LSD – and reveals why James Gandolfini called him ‘Satan’
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Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette and Paul Anthony Kelly as John F Kennedy Jr in Love Story on Disney |
Series about the lives and deaths of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr is ‘prestige television without the usual weight’
The plane vanishes. Families are told. Ashes are scattered. So ends Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s schlocky, glossy nine-part melodrama about the doomed marriage between Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr. Yet one thing is clear: the myth of Camelot – or at least this version – still captivates.
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| John Cooper Clarke |
I’M USHERED IN TO A SMALL DRESSING ROOM WHERE JOHN COOPER CLARKE IS BUZZING ABOUT HAVING JUST COME OFFSTAGE, AND PICKING OVER A PLATE OF SANDWICHES WHILE CHATTING TO A COUPLE OF FRIENDS.
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| Lydia Davis |
A woman hanged for her part in a real-life 17th-century scandal narrates a scintillating exploration of female sexuality and class
Alex Preston
Sunday 14 February 2021
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The artist’s museum in Amsterdam shows how that tone became a means of expressing emotions and ideas, from warmth to rebellion
Color is reflected light, and among all colors, few are as significant as yellow for Vincent van Gogh, who explored its possibilities during his stay in Arles, in the south of France (1888-1889). It was there that he painted the series of “Sunflowers,” five canvases depicting the flowers in a vase. For the artist, who had left behind the darkness of his early period in the Netherlands, the complexity of this hue moved him deeply and led him to associate it with the brilliance of the sun. What it meant to him and his colleagues, and how it served as a symbol of modernity and independence in the literature and fashion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are the questions that the exhibition “Yellow: Beyond Van Gogh’s Color,” at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, seeks to answer until May 17.
The artist gives new life to the hand‑painted backdrops that, before the digital era, served as scenery in films
Ditched washing machines, a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head … the Oscar-nominated director talks us through his new photography show in Athens – made with his darkroom assistant Emma Stone
The Booker-shortlisted author on a momentous teenage encounter with The Bone People, getting a buzz from Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla, and trying to avoid The Lorax
Daisy Johnson
Friday 13 March 2026
My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Petstakes me back to being four years old and being read to.
