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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

53:12

The Golden Age of Japan - The Pillow Book

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/07/01

Send us a text 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 Genji’s moonlit drama for sharp wit and razor-edged observation, stepping into the mind of a woman who didn’t just survive court life—she laughed at it. This is The Pillow Book, and our guide is Sei Shōnagon: lady-in-waiting, poet, and th...

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57:30

The Golden Age of Japan - The Tail of Genji

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/29

Send us a text 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 every fluttering sleeve. Here we find the Shining Prince, Genji—a man so irresistible he turns the entire court upside down. Through Murasaki Shikibu’s eyes, his life becomes a whirlwind of forbidden love, jealous rivals, and heartbreaks that echo ...

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62:35

Mary Shelley: Mother of Monsters

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/23

Send us a text 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 imagination. That night, she will conjure up Frankenstein—a creation that will reshape not just literature, but how we think about science, responsibility, and what it means to be human. But Mary Shelley’s real story goes far beyond the mon...

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19:07

The Mitfords Revisited: Saints, Sinners, and Scandal

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/19

Send us a text 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? In this follow-up episode, Keith peels back the layers of myth, gossip, and public outrage to look at the whole Mitford clan, this time, including the much-overlooked brother, Tom, and their delightfully eccentric parents. We venture beyond the h...

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45:21

Kew: The Garden That Changed the World

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/14

Send us a text 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, survival, and exploitation. In this episode, we uncover the tangled roots of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a quiet place that was never really quiet. For nearly three centuries, it stood at the beating heart of empire. It was here that plan...

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47:31

Master of Shadows: The Ruthless World of Robert Cecil

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/07

Send us a text 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 this world, trust is a luxury—and survival depends on knowing what others don’t. At the heart of it all: Robert Cecil. Hunchbacked, sharp-eyed, and more dangerous than any blade in the night. Cecil isn’t just Elizabeth I’s spymaster—he’s ...

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41:27

Canadian Beaver Wars: Blood on the Snow

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/05

Send us a text 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 chewing trees. This is the story of an animal that reshaped a continent, an animal so valuable, it drove men mad, sparked alliances, and unleashed a war so brutal that entire nations were wiped from the map. Between the 1600s and 1700s, the ...

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27:14

The Brontë Sisters

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/06/04

Send us a text 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 storms fiercer than anything the night can offer. They’re not the genteel daughters the world expects. They’re rebels, spinning tales of obsession, betrayal, and madness while death and disappointment prowl at their door. In a time when wo...

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52:29

Canada - The 51st State That Never Was

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/29

Send us a text 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 northern neighbor. From Revolutionary War invasion plans to 19th-century annexation bills and Cold War-era murmurs, the United States didn’t just look north, it hungered for it. We'll trace the ambitions of empires and the cracks in Canada’s fragil...

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63:55

La Belle Époque

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/24

Send us a text 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 night unravel. It is an age of opulence and illusion. Gilded carriages and motorcars jostle on cobbled streets. Art Nouveau winds its way through every iron gate, every whispered conversation. But beneath the beauty, the city is cracking. Bo...

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48:04

Jane Austen

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/21

Send us a text 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 rooms and hedgerows of Georgian England to explore the remarkable life—and legacy—of one of Britain’s most beloved novelists. Austen’s stories are full of quiet rebellion. They appear genteel, polite—embroidered with bonnets and tea cups—but ju...

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43:40

The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part Two

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/16

Send us a text 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. Thousands of files—detailing torture, rape, and castration—vanished. Some were locked away. Others were burned. Many were dumped into the sea as colonial officials scrambled to hide the truth. This wasn’t chaos. It was a cover-up. Cold. Calculated. And ...

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47:46

The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part One

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/15

Send us a text 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 loyalty, land, and blood. An oath whispered in the forests, taken in darkness, and sworn to reclaim stolen soil. For Britain, it was branded as savagery. But for the Kikuyu people, it was a desperate fight for survival. In this episode, we fol...

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49:17

Virginia Wolf - The Bloomsbury Group and Much Much More

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/10

Send us a text 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, rebels, lovers who believed in truth over convention. They questioned everything: war, empire, gender, even sanity itself. She defied the norms of literature—and of love. Her affair with the dazzling Vita Sackville-West lit a fire in her, one that...

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42:55

Newton’s Eye and Homer’s Sky

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/05/03

Send us a text In the 1660s, Isaac Newton sat alone in the dark… and slid a needle behind his eyeball — not out of madness, but to unlock the secrets of light. Centuries earlier, Homer described the ocean not as blue, but “wine-dark.” In fact, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the colour blue doesn’t exist. It’s never mentioned. Not once. That strange absence haunted William Gladstone. As a scholar—and Prime Minister—he scoured the ancient world’s most sacred texts: the Bible, the Vedas, the Kora...

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52:20

Mallory and Irvine - Ghosts on Everest

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/04/27

Send us a text High above the clouds, where the air thins and every step is a battle, two men vanished into legend." In June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine set out to conquer the unconquerable — the summit of Mount Everest — armed with little more than grit, woolen coats, and an indomitable spirit." "They were last seen alive, climbing high into the mist, agonizingly close to the top... and then — nothing. For nearly a century, the question has haunted mountaineers...

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55:59

JFK: The Man Who Dared to Dream

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/04/19

Send us a text 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 ever elected President of the United States. He was the golden boy — but behind the perfect smile and polished speeches, he lived a life built on contradictions. He saved lives in the Pacific, but couldn't rescue the Bay of Pigs. He stared d...

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40:32

The Immortal Alchemist: The Legend of Nicholas Flamel

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/04/16

Send us a text 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 secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone. Gold from lead. Life from death. Immortality. For over six centuries, he’s been spotted across Europe—unchanged. Ageless. Watching. Join Keith as he opens the ancient doors and steps into the shadows, where fac...

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30:01

Rome's Scandalous Emperors

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/04/01

Send us a text How depraved was Caligula? More than Tiberius? How monstrous was Nero? The dark reputations of these emperors owe a great deal to the Roman writer Suetonius, whose 121 AD work, "Lives of the Caesars" offered intimate portraits of 12 rulers of Rome - from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Join Keith as he interviews historian and podcaster Tom Holland who has just produced a new translation of the "Lives", as he speaks about the profound influence of Suetonius' work on today's so...

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35:46

Lord Lucan

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/03/26

Send us a text In the dead of night on November 7, 1974, Lord Lucan vanished without a trace after the brutal murder of his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, in a case that gripped Britain like a thriller novel come to life. Was this aristocratic gambler a cold-blooded killer who took his own life to escape justice—or did he disappear into a world of shadows, aided by a cabal of elite friends, slipping away to live under an assumed identity in far-off lands? In today’s episode, we dive into on...

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145 results

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