its history, the University of Cambridge has frequently been featured in literature, artistic works, television, and film. Cambridge was mentioned as early as the 14th century in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In The Reeve's Tale, the two main fictional characters are students at a University of Cambridge college called Soler Halle, which is believed to refer to King's Hall and is now part of Trinity College. The university has been the setting for all or parts of numerous novels, including Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Rose Macaulay's They Were Defeated, and Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue.
Other notable examples of the University of Cambridge in popular culture include:
Xu Zhimo's best-known poem, "On Leaving Cambridge" (simplified Chinese: 再别康桥; traditional Chinese: 再別康橋), published in 1928, is part of China's national curriculum taught to all schoolchildren and has generated a tremendous amount of adoration of the University of Cambridge in China.
In the Psmith series, a collection of novels published between 1908 and 1923 by P. G. Wodehouse, the title character and Mike, his closest friend, study at the University of Cambridge.
The 1981 film Chariots of Fire is partly set at Cambridge between 1919 and 1924 when protagonist Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross) was a student there.
The 1983 film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life features Churchill College in the film's church scene.
The film Maurice, based on the 1971 novel Maurice, is partly filmed at the University of Cambridge.
The 1989 film Dead Poets Society features character John Keating (played by Robin Williams), who is a Welton Academy English teacher described in his senior annual as "Cambridge bound".
King's College of the University of Cambridge features prominently in the 1990 short story "The Fenstanton Witch" by M. R. James.
The 1996 film True Blue centres around a mutiny at the time of the 1985 Oxford-Cambridge rowing race.
The television series Frasier (1993–2004) features Niles Crane, portrayed by David Hyde …
