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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

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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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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