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PODCAST

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

history documentary

All Episodes

37:12

The South Sea Bubble – The Madness of Men

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/07

Send us a text In 1720, London lost its mind. Merchants, maids, dukes, and kings all chased the same glittering dream, a company that promised riches from the farthest seas. But what began as a daring new financial experiment became one of the greatest scandals in history. The South Sea Bubble wasn’t just a crash, it was a mirror held up to human greed, belief, and folly. This is the story of a nation that invented the modern stock market, fell for its own illusion, and paid the price in ruin...

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13:00

Lady Emma Hamilton – Love, Loss, and Legend - Part Three

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/03

Send us a text In this final episode of the Nelson and Emma saga, the guns fall silent — but the story is far from over. As the smoke clears at Trafalgar, Britain gains its greatest hero, and Emma Hamilton loses everything she loves. Keith Hockton takes you from the decks of HMS Victory to the quiet despair of Merton Place and the lonely exile of Calais, tracing the final years of the woman who once held the heart of an empire. It’s a story of love and loss, of fame’s cruel fickleness, and of...

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66:52

Admiral Horatio Nelson – The Man Who Loved Emma -...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/01

Send us a text Last time, we told the story of Lady Emma Hamilton, the woman who loved Nelson. This time, we tell the story of the man who loved her back… and the battle that would make him immortal. It’s September, 1805. England waits in fear of invasion. Across the Channel, Napoleon’s armies are massing, and one man stands between Britain and disaster. Horatio Nelson. He’s older now, exhausted, worn thin by years at sea. But he’s still burning, for his country, for victory, and above all, f...

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70:29

Lady Emma Hamilton - The Woman Who Loved Nelson

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/27

Send us a text You know, every so often, history gifts us a character so dazzling, so impossible, that they almost seem invented. Lady Emma Hamilton was one of them. Born into poverty, she reinvented herself again and again, actress, artist’s muse, courtesan, and eventually, the most famous mistress in England. But Emma wasn’t just a pretty face. She was a survivor, a strategist, and perhaps one of the first true celebrities. She captivated painters, seduced princes, and bewitched a nation. A...

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39:27

The Darker Side of Samuel Pepys

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/23

Send us a text 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 oursel...

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37:40

When the Future Was Beautiful: The Art Deco Story

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/20

Send us a text Art Deco, it’s the style that made the future look glamorous. Born from the ashes of the First World War, it captured an age hungry for beauty, speed, and progress. You can see it in the skyline of New York, the sweep of an ocean liner, the shimmer of a cocktail bar at midnight. In this episode, we dive into the world of Art Deco, the movement that turned industry into elegance and gave modernity its first true sense of style. From Paris to Penang, from Chrysler spires to Bakel...

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56:01

Spain on Fire: The Spanish Civil War

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/15

Send us a text In the summer of 1936, a group of generals launched a coup to save Spain from its own democracy. What followed was a nightmare. The Spanish Civil War would claim half a million lives and divide a nation for generations. From Franco’s ruthless rise to the bombing of Guernica, from the dreams of the Republic to the betrayal of the democracies that looked away, this episode unpacks the war that foreshadowed the Second World War, a conflict where poets became soldiers, cities becam...

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36:02

The Magna Carta: A Promise That Endured

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/08

Send us a text In the summer of 1215, a bad-tempered king met his match in a field by the Thames. Surrounded by rebellious barons, King John of England was forced to seal a document he barely understood, one that would outlive him by centuries. The Magna Carta wasn’t meant to change the world. It was supposed to be a quick fix, a peace treaty. But instead, it planted a radical idea: that no one, not even the king, is above the law. In this episode, we go back to Runnymede, to the mud, the pol...

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51:40

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/10/02

Send us a text Two Sundays, fifty years apart, changed Ireland forever. In Dublin, 1920, Michael Collins’s men struck at dawn, assassinating British agents. By afternoon, Croke Park ran red with blood as Crown forces opened fire on a football crowd, killing men, women, and children. Half a century later, in Derry, 1972, British paratroopers shot down unarmed civil rights marchers, reigniting the Troubles and inspiring U2’s haunting anthem Sunday Bloody Sunday. This episode unravels both trage...

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37:09

Victoria's Secret

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/09/23

Send us a text A widowed queen, a loyal servant, and a friendship that defied every convention of the Victorian age. In this episode, we uncover the unlikely bond between Queen Victoria and John Brown, a relationship whispered about in drawing rooms, condemned in newspapers, and immortalised in legend. Was Brown simply her devoted attendant, or something far more intimate? From the windswept Highlands to the corridors of Windsor, we follow the trail of letters, estate inventories, and r...

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62:29

The Colosseum: Power, Glory, and Death

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/09/13

Send us a text For nearly 2,000 years, this colossal arena has stood as Rome’s most breathtaking monument to spectacle, power, and blood. In its day, the Colosseum wasn’t just a stadium—it was a machine built for awe. Here emperors staged games that made the entire empire gasp: gladiators battling to the death, wild beasts from Africa unleashed before roaring crowds, and the Roman people fed a steady diet of violence, theatre, and politics disguised as entertainment. But the Colosseum is more...

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27:42

Edinburgh Castle: Scotland’s Dark Heart

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/09/07

Send us a text Picture this. You’re standing on a black volcanic rock, the wind clawing at your coat, the sound of bagpipes drifting faintly from somewhere down on the Royal Mile. Ahead of you, looming over the city like a brooding giant, is Edinburgh Castle. Its stone walls, scarred by centuries of fire, rebellion, and siege, rise from the crag as if carved by some ancient hand. This isn’t just a fortress. It’s the beating heart of Scotland’s story. Here kings were crowned, traitors were exe...

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43:48

Notre Dame: The Soul of Paris

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/08/24

Send us a text 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, revolutions rage, and fire nearly bring it to its knees. This isn’t just a cathedral. It is a witness to history, a stage for triumph and tragedy, faith and fury, art and ambition. Today, we step through those ancient doors. We climb into...

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54:10

The Congo - Leopolds Downfall - Part Three

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/08/18

Send us a text 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 hands. His relentless campaign, joined by the voice of Roger Casement and the pen of Mark Twain, turns the Congo into the first great human rights scandal of the twentieth century. But Leopold fights back, with lobbyists, bribery, and sh...

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75:36

The Congo - A Society of Murderers - Part Two

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/08/11

Send us a text 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 motor car in Europe turn the Congo’s wild vines into gold, but every drop of latex is wrung from the land through terror. Villages are burned, women taken hostage, and men worked to death. Severed hands, collected in baskets as proof of p...

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72:49

The Congo - The Nightmare Begins - Part One

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/08/03

Send us a text 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 transformed into a private slaughterhouse. Not by an empire. Not by a government. But by a single man, King Leopold II of Belgium. This is not just a tale of colonial greed. It’s a story of terror disguised as civilisation. Of rubber quotas enfor...

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20:23

Bond - James Bond, and his Watches

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/08/01

Send us a text 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. Bond’s watches have done more than tick. They’ve detonated charges, fired lasers, unzipped wetsuits, and, every now and then, saved the world. And yet, somehow, they’ve always managed to look devastatingly stylish while doing it. From the Ro...

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45:34

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury - The Bone Merchant

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/07/25

Send us a text 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 between glorious legacy and looming uncertainty. And into that dangerous world stepped a man who looked more like a clerk than a kingmaker. Small, stooped, and sickly, Robert Cecil was easy to underestimate. That was his greatest weapon. H...

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51:16

Diana Unfiltered: Beyond the Fairy Tale

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/07/21

Send us a text 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 fairy tale, and it’s certainly not the tabloid spectacle we’ve grown used to. It’s something far more intriguing, a story of light and shadow, public adoration and private sorrow, rebellion and vulnerability, all swirling together behind the palace gat...

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57:18

Vietnam: The Unwinnable War

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/07/03

Send us a text 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 world deeper into chaos. This isn’t just a story of generals and politicians, it’s the slow unraveling of hope. In the jungles and cities, ambition curdles into paranoia, and victory slips further from reach with every bomb dropped, every...

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145 results

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