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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
96 episodes
Canada - The 51st State That Never Was
There was a time when Canada teetered on the edge of vanishing, not through war, but through quiet conquest.In this dark chapter of North American history, we'll uncovers the unsettling truth behind America’s long obsession with its nort...
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Season 1
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Episode 96
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52:29
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La Belle Époque
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 95
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1:03:55
Wit as Weapon: Jane Austen’s Disarming Charm
She never married. She never travelled far. And when she died at just forty-one, only a handful of people knew her name.And yet—Jane Austen changed the literary world forever. And in today’s episode, we’re stepping back into the drawing ...
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Season 1
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Episode 94
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48:04
The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part Two
In Part One, we uncovered the foundations of a rebellion—the Mau Mau oath, the theft of ancestral land, and the British Empire’s ruthless response. But what came next was even more chilling.This is the part they tried to erase.Tho...
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Season 1
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Episode 93
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43:40
The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part One
Kenya, 1952. Beneath the surface of the colonial order, something was stirring—something ancient, defiant, and dangerous to the British Empire.This is the story of the Mau Mau: a secretive and feared movement, bound by a powerful oath of...
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Season 1
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Episode 92
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47:46
Bloomsbury’s Broken Light - Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf didn’t just write novels—she cracked open the mind and bled onto the page. Time, memory, madness, sex, death—nothing was too sacred. Nothing was off limits.In the heart of Bloomsbury, she found her tribe—artists...
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Season 1
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Episode 91
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49:17
The Colour That Haunted History
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 90
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42:55
Mallory and Irvine - Ghosts on Everest
High above the world, where the wind screams and the air itself turns hostile, two men vanished into legend.In June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine ascended into the death zone of Mount Everest—draped not in modern gear, but in wo...
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Season 1
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Episode 89
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52:20
John F. Kennedy: The Man Who Dared to Dream
He had the jawline of a movie star, the charm of a matinee idol, and the pedigree of American royalty. But John Fitzgerald Kennedy was more than just a handsome face — he was a war hero, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the youngest man eve...
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Season 1
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Episode 88
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55:59
Nicholas Flamel: The Immortal Alchemist
They say he died in the fourteenth century. But his tomb was empty. No body. No bones. Just silence.Nicholas Flamel—a name etched into dusty grimoires and whispered in secret circles. A medieval scribe who, legend claims, unlocked the se...
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Season 1
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Episode 87
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40:32
Thrones of Blood: Rome’s Darkest Emperors
How monstrous were Rome’s emperors? Was Caligula truly mad enough to declare war on the sea? Did Nero really watch Rome burn while playing his lyre? And were these men depraved by nature—or crafted that way by the sharpened pen of Suetonius?
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Season 1
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Episode 86
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30:01
The Lord Lucan File: Blood, Shadows, and Silence
On a cold November night in 1974, blood was spilled in a Belgravia basement. Sandra Rivett, the nanny, was bludgeoned to death. The intended target, perhaps, was someone else. The killer vanished. So did Lord Lucan.An aristocrat with a g...
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Season 1
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Episode 85
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35:42
Three Scots in Africa - Slave, Slaver, Abolitionist
Today’s journey takes us deep into the heart of Africa – a continent rich in culture, but ravaged by the forces of empire, greed… and the struggle for humanity.Sir John Henderson – the nobleman who was a slave. Richard Oswald – Politicia...
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Season 1
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Episode 84
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47:55
Tolkien – Part Two: When the World Was Young
Last time, we traced the scars of war across Tolkien’s early life. Now, we enter the shadow of The Lord of the Rings—a tale forged in the mud of the trenches and tempered by death, faith, and memory.Middle-earth is not fantasy—i...
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Season 1
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Episode 83
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1:02:30
Tolkien – Part One: When the World Was Young
In the quiet corners of a small English town, in the flickering glow of candlelight, a boy loses himself in the pages of myth and legend—unaware that one day, his own words will shape the greatest fantasy saga ever written.Joh...
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Season 1
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Episode 82
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54:07
Malta - The Greatest Siege in History
Picture this: A sun-scorched island in the heart of the Mediterranean. A desperate band of knights, vastly outnumbered, stands against the might of an empire. It is the year 1565, and the Ottoman war machine—30,000 strong—has arrived on the sho...
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Season 1
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Episode 81
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47:45
Nostradamus: The Prophet of Shadows
For centuries, the shadow of Nostradamus has stretched across history like a curse.His cryptic quatrains, etched in riddles and veiled in doom, have been blamed—and believed—for the rise of tyrants, the fall of empires, and disasters sti...
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Season 1
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Episode 80
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33:50
Banking Collapses: When Empires Eat Themselves
Money builds empires. But when it dies, it drags entire civilizations down with it.From the marble halls of ancient Rome to the glass towers of modern Wall Street, financial collapse has haunted humanity like a recurring nightmare. In th...
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Season 1
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Episode 79
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35:32
Greenland: Strategic, Silent, Surging
Greenland isn’t just ice and isolation—it’s one of the most strategically coveted places on Earth.Home to the Inuit for over 4,500 years, and later the Norse led by Erik the Red, Greenland has always drawn those bold—or desperate—enough ...
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Season 1
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Episode 78
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36:57
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 77
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45:10
Panama Canal: A Corridor of Corpses
The Panama Canal wasn't built, it was bled into existence.What began in the 1880s as a grand French dream quickly unraveled into a nightmare. Led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who conquered the Suez, workers fell by the thousands, cla...
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Season 1
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Episode 76
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34:48
Greatness Demands Blood
What does it mean to be great—truly great? Once, the title was thundered through history: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great. It meant something vast, undeniable—power, vision, audacity, and impact that ...
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Season 1
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Episode 75
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31:28
Alexander: The Shadow Before the Storm – Part Two
As Alexander the Great marched into the scorched lands of India, his ambition had become something more than hunger, it was obsession. At the banks of the Hydaspes, he faced King Porus and a wall of war elephants, beasts bred for terror and des...
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Season 1
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Episode 74
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55:56
Alexander: The Shadow Before the Storm – Part One
Born in blood and prophecy in 356 BC, Alexander of Macedonia was never meant for peace. His mother, Olympias, whispered of divine ancestry and Achilles’ blood. His father, Philip II, carved an empire from fractured tribes and raised a son who w...
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Season 1
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Episode 73
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54:02
The Great Fire of London - The Ashes of 1666
In the early hours of September 1666, a single spark in a baker’s shop ignited an unstoppable force—one that would consume the very soul of London. Within days, fire swallowed over 13,000 homes, St. Paul’s Cathedral crumbled in flames, and the ...
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Season 1
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Episode 72
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40:21