The Latest Breaking News from Chaucer

‘Heath Ledger knocked my tooth out jousting with a broom’: how we made A Knight’s Tale

‘The lances were made of balsa wood and filled with uncooked spaghetti – so that when they broke, there’d be an explosion of what looked like splinters’

The Guardian - UK · Feb 16

From the Miller’s Tale to King Lear’s roaring sea, a history of flooding in literature

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is renowned for its salacious storyline of sexual misadventure. Set in 14th-century Oxford, it tells the tale of John the Carpenter, a husband so terrified that another “Noah’s flood” is coming to drown the world that he sleeps in a basket in the attic – freeing…

The Conversation · Dec 4, 2025

Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road review – ‘I could look forever at these passing moments in cosmic colours’

The Japanese master’s weightless gaze birthed not only French impressionism but also the whole ideal of art as a way of capturing momentary glimpses of everyday joy

The Guardian - UK · Apr 27, 2025

24 of the best-selling novels of all time to read in 2024

Increase your cultural capital and expand your worldview

Evening Standard · Dec 20, 2023

At £38,700 for a foreign-born spouse, how many could the Tories afford?

James Cleverly’s new anti-immigration policy, the latest desperate act of a desperate government, means 75% of the population need to be careful who they fall in love with

The Guardian - UK · Dec 10, 2023

Rupert Murdoch has a thing for women aged 66. But what could be in it for them?

The media mogul’s new girlfriend, just like recent exes, falls within his favourite demographic

The Guardian - UK · Aug 20, 2023

Foraging, art and history in the Kent Downs

Nature and tales of the past are brought to life along the North Downs Way and around Canterbury by new projects engaging visitors with local knowledge and ages-old skills

The Guardian - UK · Apr 11, 2023

St Valentine has nothing to do with love or romance and the day was just made up

Poets have created the story that inspired Valentine's Day

Wales Online · Feb 14, 2023

Valentine’s Day’s connection with love was probably invented by Chaucer and other 14th-century poets

As an undergraduate, on a tour of Europe, I happened to step into the church where Saint Valentine’s head was kept. The tour guide told us a (likely fictitious) story about Saint Valentine performing forbidden marriages for persecuted Christians under the Roman emperor Claudius Gothicus (possibly 269-270 AD). Valentine was…

The Conversation · Feb 13, 2023

Commentary: Clinging to old classics can go hand in hand with banning books

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also trying to corral our kids back to Hawthorne and Hemingway, Dante and Dickens.

Los Angeles Times · Oct 25, 2022