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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
154 episodes
The Last Letters of Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette still haunts history. Not because of the diamonds, the silk gowns, or the myth of “Let them eat cake”, but because beneath the powdered image was a real woman slowly being destroyed by revolution, propaganda, fear, and public h...
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Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? The Lost Christianities
What if the Christianity we know today was only one version among many?In the earliest centuries after Jesus, Christianity was not a single unified faith but a chaotic world of rival gospels, competing prophets, strange miracles, and wil...
The Ninth: A Legion Erased
They marched into the mists of Scotland… and something in those mists did not let them return.The Legio IX Hispana had once been Rome at its most ruthless. Veterans of slaughter in Hispania, men who had learned to kill without hesitation...
Marks That Outlive Us - Tattoos and the Stories We Carry
Tattoos are not really about ink. They are about memory, identity, and the quiet human need to leave a mark.Across thousands of years, people have chosen to carve meaning into their own skin, sometimes as an act of devotion, sometimes of...
Vietnam, The War That Broke America
We step into the shadows of Southeast Asia, where beauty and violence sit side by side, and something begins to break. Vietnam is no longer a distant conflict. It is the place where power is tested, and found wanting.This is not a story ...
The Emergency: Fear, Fire, and the Making of Modern Malaya
It doesn’t begin with a declaration of war. It begins with unease.In the humid aftermath of the Second World War, British Malaya looks stable on the surface, plantations hum, the Union Jack flies once more, and the machinery of empire cr...
Secrets of the Freemasons
They’ve been blamed for everything from world domination to hiding the Ark of the Covenant—yet they still can’t agree on who brings the biscuits to the meeting.The Freemasons: part medieval guild, part secret society, part boys’ club wit...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Ambassadors (Part Three)
Step into the quiet grandeur of the National Gallery and come face to face with one of the most unsettling masterpieces ever painted, The Ambassadors. At first, it appears to be a portrait of wealth, power, and Renaissance confidence, two men s...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Garden of Earthly Delights (Part Two)
There are paintings you admire… and then there are paintings that quietly take hold of you, refusing to let go. The Garden of Earthly Delights is firmly in the latter camp.Set within the shadowed grandeur of the Museo del Prado, this ext...
Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Arnolfini Portrait: A Marriage or a Mystery (Part One)
What if the world’s most famous paintings are not what they seem?In this series, Masterpieces and Mysteries steps beyond the frame to uncover the hidden stories behind some of history’s greatest works of art. These are not just ...
Harald Hardrada - Viking, Mercenary, King (Part Two)
Exile. Warrior. Something more than a man.In Part Two, Harald Hardrada arrives in Constantinople, the greatest city on earth, and enters the brutal, glittering world of the Varangian Guard.What follows is a life lived at the edge,...
Harald Hardrada - Viking, Mercenary, King (Part One)
Before 1066, before Stamford Bridge, before he became a legend, Harald Hardrada was a boy standing in a collapsing shield wall, watching his world burn.Wounded, hunted, and forced into exile, he vanishes east into a vast and dangerous wo...
The Bible - The Book That Changed the World… and Nearly Tore It Apart
This episode turns to the Bible, not as a relic, but as a living document shaped by centuries of belief, conflict, and interpretation. What begins in the ancient Hebrew texts unfolds into the foundations of Christianity, and then into the conte...
The Birmingham Gang
Birmingham told itself it was a city of progress. Industry, pride, invention. But beneath the smoke lay something far darker, cramped streets, shared poverty, and young men learning that survival meant violence.They were not heroes. Not ...
H. Rider Haggard - King Solomon's Mines
Before Indiana Jones ever cracked a whip, there was Allan Quatermain—big-game hunter, reluctant hero, and the original explorer of darkest Africa in search of lost kingdoms and forbidden treasure.King Solomon’s Mines ex...
The Mitfords Revisited: Saints, Sinners, and Scandal
Last year, our deep-dive into the wild world of the Mitford sisters ruffled a few aristocratic feathers and sparked a torrent of listener emails. The question that echoed through every message was simple, but loaded: Were they all bad?...
Æthelstan - The First King of England
Eleven hundred years ago, a young king stood in Kingston upon Thames and was crowned, and in that moment, something entirely new began to take shape.His name was Æthelstan.In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we...
The Mitford Sisters - A Frivolity of Evil
They were born into privilege, raised for balls and debutante seasons—but the Mitford Sisters would become something far more dangerous than society darlings.In the glittering 1920s, Diana Mitford was hailed as the most beautiful woman i...
Kipling’s Shadow: The Dark Wisdom of 'If'
Rudyard Kipling’s If— and The Two-Sided Man aren’t just poems—they’re survival guides wrapped in verse. Fierce, honest, and deeply human, they capture the struggle to stay balanced in a world constantly pulling us apart.
Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War
In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we descend into one of the most dangerous worlds of the Second World War, the claustrophobic steel tubes of Hitler’s U-boats. Drawing on Roger Moorhouse’s gripping study of the submarine war...
How Christianity Conquered Rome
How did a tiny movement centred on a crucified Jewish teacher grow into the dominant religion of the Roman world? In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we explore the extraordinary rise of Christianity, from small communities ...
Konfrontasi - Malaysia's Secret War
Konfrontasi was the war that refused to call itself a war.In the 1960s, President Sukarno denounced the creation of Malaysia and launched a shadow conflict across the jungles of Borneo and into the streets of Singapore. What followed was...
The Trial and Execution of Charles I
In January 1649, something happened that had never happened before.A reigning monarch was put on trial by his own people.In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we step inside the charged, breathless drama of the trial of C...
Football in No Man’s Land: Christmas 1914
In December 1914, in the frozen mud between the trenches, something astonishing happened.The war paused.On the Western Front, beneath a hard winter sky, British and German soldiers began to sing. First carols drifted across No Man...