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Rearview Mirror Chronicles
Keith Hockton, FRAS, is a writer, publisher, and award-winning podcaster based in Penang, Malaysia, with a deep passion for uncovering the stories that shaped our world. As the Southeast Asia Editor for International Living magazine, Keith explores the intersections of history, culture, and modern life across the region.
A dynamic lecturer and storyteller, he speaks internationally on Southeast Asian politics, economics, and history—bringing the past to life with clarity, wit, and insight. Keith is also a proud Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and is on a mission to make history not only accessible but genuinely entertaining for everyone.
His published books include:
• Atlas of Australian Dive Sites - Travellers Edition (Harper Collins Australia, 2003).
• Penang - An inside guide to its historic homes, buildings, monuments and parks (MPH Publishing, 2012; 2nd Edition 2014; 3rd Edition 2017).
• Festivals of Malaysia (Trafalgar Publishing, 2015).
• The Habitat Penang Hill: A pocket history (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)
• Alana and the Secret Life of Trees at Night (Entrepot Publishing, 2018)
• Penang Then & Now: A Century of Change in Pictures (Entrepot Publishing, 2019; 2nd Edition 2021
• Bersama Lima - Five Together (Entrepot Publishing, 2022)
www.entrepotpublishing.com
Episodes
192 episodes
How the East India Company Took Penang: A Promise Betrayed
In 1786, Francis Light raised the British flag over Penang and changed the history of the Malay Peninsula. But the deal behind it was far murkier than the familiar story suggests.The Sultan of Kedah believed he was gaining British protec...
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Gallipoli
In April 1915, thousands of young Australians and New Zealanders approached an unfamiliar Turkish coastline in small boats. Most had never been under fire. Within hours, a new word would enter history: ANZAC.Gallipoli was supposed to be ...
The Knights Templar: The King, the Curse and the Lost Treasure
They began as a handful of armed monks protecting pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. Within two centuries, the Knights Templar had become one of the most powerful organisations in medieval Europe, warriors, landowners, financiers and servants o...
Bloomsbury Ley Lines - The Tangled Web
The Bloomsbury Group were writers, artists, thinkers and intellectuals who helped reshape twentieth century culture. But behind the books, paintings and radical ideas was something altogether more complicated.The more you follow their li...
Bloomsbury: Art, Obsession, and Ruin
They shattered convention with every stroke of the pen and brush—and tore through each other’s lives in the process.The Bloomsbury Group wasn’t just a circle of intellectuals—it was a volatile mix of writers, artists, and thinkers who li...
Colour - What We Really See
In the 1660s, Isaac Newton sat alone in the dark—and drove a needle behind his eye. Not out of madness, but to understand light.Centuries earlier, Homer described the sea not as blue, but wine-dark. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the colo...
Fibonacci - The Man Who Gave Us Zero
Fibonacci is famous for rabbits. But that's not why he matters.His real name was Leonardo of Pisa. In 1202, he did something that quietly reshaped civilization: he taught Europe to count. He brought the Hindu-Arabic numerals, 0, 1, 2, 3,...
The Year Summer Never Came
In June 1816, a New England farmer woke to find snow falling on his summer crops. Ten thousand miles away, an Indonesian volcano had exploded, and what it threw into the sky was about to change the world. This is the story of Mount ...
Civilization in a Glass - How Wine Built the World
What gives a freedman the power to insult an emperor? The answer lies in a single sentence spoken over a glass of wine nearly two thousand years ago.Wine isn't just what people drink, it's what built empires, shaped trade routes, and det...
Trump Is Nero. You're the Crowd.
Rome is burning, and the Emperor is on stage, singing. We all know the image. But what if Nero isn't history, what if Nero is now?In this episode, historian Keith Hockton draws a line from Nero's Rome to Trump's America, through a single...
Zulu — Shaka Zulu, Warrior King (Part Two)
An outcast boy with no right to anything took a cattle-clan of a few thousand souls and, inside a single lifetime, forged it into a nation, one strong enough, sixty years after his death, to hand the British Empire the worst defeat it had ever ...
Zulu - The Day of the Dead Moon (Part One)
On a single afternoon in January 1879, in a corner of southern Africa most of the men fighting there could not have found on a map, the British Empire suffered the worst defeat in its history, and, a few miles away, under the same sky, fought t...
The Durian: Four Hundred Years of Arguement
They banned it from the trains. They barred it from the hotels. And still they called it the King of Fruits. For four hundred years the durian split every traveller who ate it clean in two, one gagging at rotten onions, the next mel...
Would You Survive a Day in the 14th Century?
How hard was it, really, just to stay alive in the fourteenth century? You wake up in an English village around 1350 and find out, one hazard at a time. The smoke-filled house. The sewer you drink from. The splinter that becomes a g...
History’s Strangest Questions: Was a Lord of the Realm Hanged for a Comma?
In 1911, the British Crown knighted Roger Casement for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon. Five years later, the same government hanged him for treason. Ever since, people have said he was "hanged on a comma", that a singl...
The Penang Riots of 1867 - George Town at War
George Town, 1867.Beneath the British flag, another power ruled the streets.Secret societies commanded thousands of men. Money flowed through opium, gambling and the revenue farms. Loyalties ran deeper than the law, and behind the...
The Wrath of Khan: When Hell Rode West (Part Two)
Genghis Khan didn't want the war that would become the most devastating campaign of his life.It began with a trade caravan, the murder of hundreds of merchants, and one spectacularly arrogant decision by a ruler who had no idea who he wa...
The Wrath of Khan - The Making of Genghis Khan (Part One)
A boy abandoned on the frozen Mongolian steppe should have died there. Instead, he survived to become Genghis Khan, the ruler who would unleash the most formidable war machine the medieval world had ever seen.In Part One of The Wrath...
La Belle Époque - An Age of Opulence and Illusion
Paris, 1900. The city glows with electric light. Jazz drips from gramophones. The Moulin Rouge spins like a carousel possessed. In the cafés of Montmartre, Picasso sketches with fevered hands. Toulouse-Lautrec drinks, draws, and watches the nig...
The Odyssey Explained: Why Homer's Epic Still Matters
For nearly three thousand years, Homer's Odyssey has captivated audiences with its unforgettable monsters, legendary heroes, and epic adventures. But beneath the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the wrath of the gods lies a far deeper story—on...
The Madman’s Library: Bound in Flesh, Written in Blood
Welcome to the Madman’s Library—a place not of learning, but of unraveling.Here, books do not enlighten. They whisper. They bleed. They rot. Grimoires etched in rust-black ink speak in tongues never meant for...
The Quiet Revolutionary: Vermeer, Pearls, and the Company That Bought the World
What if one of history's greatest painters wasn't simply creating beautiful pictures, but quietly capturing the birth of the modern world?In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith explores the extraordinary life of Jo...
They Took the Children: How a Nation Tried to Erase a People
For more than a century, one of the world's most admired democracies carried out a policy that sought to erase Indigenous cultures by removing their children. More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit boys and girls were taken from their...
The Elephant in the Nursery: What Children's Books Really Tell Us
There are books that shape our childhood, and then there are books that quietly shape the way we see the world.In this fascinating episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton takes a fresh look at some of the most belov...
History’s Strangest Questions: Who Was The Man Who Accidentally Poisoned the Planet?
What if the person who caused the greatest environmental damage in human history wasn't a dictator, a conqueror, or a ruthless industrialist... but a brilliant engineer trying to make the world a better place?In this episode of Histor...