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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
Rearview Mirror Chronicles
The Darker Side of Samuel Pepys
Most people know Samuel Pepys as the man who gave us one of the greatest diaries in English history, a meticulous observer of the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Restoration court. A man of reason, order, and astonishing curiosity.
But turn the page a little further, and a different Pepys begins to emerge, darker, more conflicted, and all too human. A man who writes not just of kings and fires, but of lust, shame, deceit, and the strange bargains we strike with ourselves when no one else is watching.
His diary is a mirror, polished, yes, but cracked in places, and through those cracks we glimpse a side of Pepys that history textbooks prefer to ignore. The voyeur, the sinner, the man tormented by his own appetites.
Tonight, we open that diary again. Not the polite version. The real one.
This is The Darker Side of Samuel Pepys.
For books written and published by Keith Hocton