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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
112 episodes
Notre Dame: The Soul of Paris
Bells ringing across the Paris skyline, echoing over the Seine, rolling like thunder through eight centuries of history. At the very heart of the city, at the heart of France itself, stands a masterpiece: Notre Dame. It has seen kings crowned, ...
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Season 1
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Episode 112
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43:48
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The Congo - Leopolds Downfall - Part Three
In the final chapter of our Congo series, King Leopold’s dark empire begins to unravel. From the Antwerp docks, a young shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel uncovers a deadly secret, a trade built not on goods, but on guns, blood, and severed...
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Season 1
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Episode 111
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54:10
The Congo - A Society of Murderers - Part Two
Picking up from the blood-soaked ivory trails of Part One, Part Two plunges deeper into King Leopold’s private empire as the hunger for profit shifts from elephant tusks to an even deadlier harvest, rubber. The bicycle boom and the rise of the ...
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Season 1
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Episode 110
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1:15:36
The Congo - The Nightmare Begins - Part One
It is one of the darkest chapters in human history, and yet—astonishingly—one of the least known. At the turn of the 20th century, deep in the uncharted heart of Africa, a vast swathe of land nearly eighty times the size of Belgium was transfor...
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Season 1
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Episode 109
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1:12:49
Bond - James Bond, and his Watches
There’s a reason James Bond makes an entrance like no one else. The tuxedo, the swagger, the one-liners that land like bullets, and of course, the watch. Always the watch. Because in the world of 007, it’s never just about telling the time....
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Season 1
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Episode 108
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20:23
Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury - The Bone Merchant
Late Tudor and early Stuart England was a world of whispers and daggers, where faith could cost you your head and loyalty was a currency more precious than gold. It was a time of espionage, betrayal, and uneasy succession, a kingdom teetering b...
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Season 1
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Episode 107
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45:34
Diana Unfiltered: Beyond the Fairy Tale
Today, we’re stepping into the shimmering, storm-tossed world of Diana, Princess of Wales, queen of hearts, icon of our age.But forget what you think you know. Because Diana’s story, as told in Edward White’s Dianaworld, isn’t a...
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Season 1
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Episode 106
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51:16
Vietnam: The Unwinnable War
Tonight, we enter the shadows of Southeast Asia, where the scent of frangipani drifts through streets haunted by war and secrets. Vietnam is about to become the battleground not just for armies, but for ideals and egos, each choice pulling the ...
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Season 1
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Episode 105
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57:18
The Golden Age of Japan - The Pillow Book
Welcome back to The Golden Age of Japan. Last time, we wandered the scented corridors of the imperial court with Murasaki Shikibu and glimpsed the tangled loves and rivalries that defined The Tale of Genji. Tonight, everything shifts. We trade ...
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Season 1
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Episode 104
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53:12
The Golden Age of Japan - The Tale of Genji
Tonight, step with me into the glittering, treacherous world of Heian Japan—a palace where secrets drift on scented air, poems are currency, and beauty can make or break a destiny.Within these gilded corridors, ambition hides behind ever...
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Season 1
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Episode 103
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57:30
Mary Shelley: Mother of Monsters
Picture this—a storm-lashed night by Lake Geneva, thunder rumbling over the water, candles guttering in the gloom. In a circle of restless young poets and radicals sits Mary Shelley, barely out of her teens, haunted by grief but burning with im...
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Season 1
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Episode 102
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1:02:35
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?...
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Season 1
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Episode 101
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19:07
Kew: The Garden That Changed the World
Walk with me through a garden. Not just any garden, mind you, this is Kew. A place where palm trees from the Pacific share soil with Himalayan orchids, and where, if you listen closely, every leaf rustles with a story of conquest, trade, surviv...
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Season 1
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Episode 100
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45:21
Master of Shadows: The Ruthless World of Robert Cecil
Let’s begin in the shadows. London, 1603. The city is thick with smoke, secrets, and the scent of betrayal. Beneath the grand stone facades of Elizabethan power, a network of spies weaves through taverns, palaces, and plague-ridden streets. In ...
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Season 1
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Episode 99
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47:31
Canadian Beaver Wars: Blood on the Snow
Imagine standing on the edge of a Canadian forest, the trees black against a bruised sky, the only sound the ripple of water, and a sudden, thunderous splash. It’s a beaver. But this isn’t just the story of a quirky rodent building dams and che...
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Season 1
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Episode 98
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41:27
The Brontë Sisters
The wind screams across the Yorkshire moors, battering a lonely stone house where three sisters huddle close to the flame of a guttering candle. Outside, the world is bleak and cold, but inside, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are conjuring s...
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Season 1
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Episode 97
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27:14
Canada - The 51st State?
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
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