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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

41:45

Æthelstan - The First King of England

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/03/23

Send us Fan Mail 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 explore the life and reign of the man who forged the first recognisable Kingdom of England, not through inheritance alone, but through strategy, diplomacy, and decisive force. From a contested succession and a fractured landscape of rival kingdoms, to the ...

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47:02

Steel Coffins of the Atlantic: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/03/16

Send a text 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, we explore the brutal reality faced by the crews who hunted Allied shipping across the Atlantic. Life inside a U-boat was filthy, suffocating, and terrifying, with sailors enduring scurvy, sleep deprivation, and the constant fear that the next de...

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63:34

How Christianity Conquered Rome

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/03/13

Send a text 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 meeting quietly in Roman cities to a powerful institution that would eventually shape the destiny of an empire. But this is not just a story about belief. It is also about organisation, trade networks, politics, and the administrative machinery...

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41:54

Konfrontasi - A War in the Shadows

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/03/02

Send a text 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 not a declared campaign with front lines and fanfare, but a slow, dangerous escalation fought in humidity, silence, and political denial. Special Air Service patrols crossed invisible borders under tight secrecy. Special Boat Service teams moved ...

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50:46

The Day They Tried a King

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/02/28

Send a text 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 Charles I. A king who believed he ruled by divine right now found himself facing a court that denied that any man stood above the law. The stakes were nothing less than the future of England itself. Was this justice, or revolution dressed up as legality?...

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34:06

Football in No Man’s Land: Christmas 1914

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/02/20

Send a text 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’s Land. Then cautious voices answered. And then, in an act so simple it feels almost impossible, men climbed out of their trenches. They shook hands. They exchanged cigarettes. They buried their dead. And somewhere in that scarred, cratered wasteland, ...

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35:40

Greenwich - The Home of Time

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/02/06

Send us a text For most of human history, time was a local affair. Noon was when the sun sat highest in the sky, and every town lived by its own clock. Then, quietly and decisively, one place changed everything. In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we travel to Royal Observatory Greenwich, the unlikely hilltop that became the centre of global time. We explore how astronomers, clockmakers, sailors, and empire builders wrestled with the problem of longitude, why a single line drawn ac...

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48:57

Mysterious Manuscripts

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/02/02

Send us a text Some books refuse to be read. They arrive without an author, without a key, sometimes without even a recognisable language, and then sit there, daring us to make sense of them. In this episode, we step into the shadowy world of mysterious manuscripts, texts written in ciphers no one can crack, alphabets that belong to no known culture, and pages filled with symbols, diagrams, and illustrations that feel deliberate, intelligent, and utterly alien. From books that seem to straddl...

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45:05

Jane Austen, Her Final Days

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/01/28

Send us a text In her final years, Jane Austen was finally a published success, and quietly, unmistakably dying. This episode follows Austen through the narrowing circle of her last months, her illness, her unfinished work, and the extraordinary mental clarity she retained as her body failed. From the calm precision of Persuasion to the sharp, unfinished promise of Sanditon, we see a writer still evolving, still experimenting, still thinking, even as time runs out. We explore the mystery of h...

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47:54

Hatshepsut

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/01/24

Send us a text History tells us that Ancient Egypt was a man’s world. Kings, warriors, gods with beards, power passed from father to son like a sacred inheritance. And then there’s Hatshepsut. A woman who did not simply rule Egypt, she redefined what rule looked like. She did not seize power in a bloody coup. She did not lead armies into battle. Instead, she did something far more dangerous. She rewrote the rules quietly, methodically, stone by stone. She wore the regalia of kingship. She spo...

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64:49

To the Edge of the World, Agricola, Scotland, and...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/01/14

Send us a text Rome’s legions have crushed rebellion, broken queens, and burned their way across Britain, but the conquest is not yet complete. In this final episode, we march north with Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the most brilliant general Britain would ever face. From relentless campaigns in the wilds of Caledonia to the shadowed slopes of Mons Graupius, this is war at the edge of the known world. Agricola wins glory, secures Britain for Rome, and returns to the capital a hero, only to d...

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58:21

The Roman Invasion of Britain: The Rise of Boudicca-...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/01/05

Send us a text Rome thought Britain was broken. In this third episode of the Roman invasion of Britain, we ride straight into fire, blood, and fury with Boudicca, the warrior queen who very nearly destroyed Roman rule on the island. This is not the neat legend of school textbooks. This is the raw story of humiliation, revenge, and absolute rage. A widowed queen flogged in public. Her daughters violated. A people pushed beyond endurance. What follows is one of the most terrifying rebellions th...

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61:34

The Roman Invasion of Britain: The Empire Strikes...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/12/21

Send us a text This episode opens with the bizarre and unsettling prelude under the mad emperor Caligula, when invasion looms like a dark cloud, only to dissolve into mockery and chaos. But the threat doesn't vanish—it festers. Then comes Claudius, an unlikely emperor desperate for legitimacy, who does what Caligula could not: he unleashes his legions across the Channel in a gamble for glory and power. We plunge into the clash of worlds—Rome's iron discipline crashing against the wild, fractu...

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53:04

The Roman Conquest of Britain: Julius Caesar Lands At...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/12/17

Send us a text In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we return to the moment Julius Caesar steps onto the shores of Britain in 55 BC, a bold gamble at the very edge of the Roman world. Britain is not yet a conquest but a rumour, a place of shifting tribes, chariots on the beaches, and uneasy diplomacy. Caesar’s landings are about prestige and intelligence as much as warfare, and they bind Britain, loosely but permanently, to Rome’s ambitions. From there, we trace how Britain becomes ...

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39:36

The Numerburg Trials and Beyond - Part Two

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/12/09

Send us a text In Part One we watched Hermann Goring face the judges at Nuremberg, but Part Two is where the story really hits home. Because Nuremberg did not end in 1946, it launched a revolution, one that still shapes global justice today. It gave us the Genocide Convention, the tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and ultimately the International Criminal Court, a court designed to hold even presidents and generals to account. But here is the twist. The same world that created these rules ...

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45:55

Christopher Marlowe, A Murder in Deptford

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/12/04

Send us a text Christopher Marlowe was a genius, a heretic, and almost certainly a spy. In the shadowy world of Elizabethan London, where faith was treason and a careless word could mean death, Marlowe moved easily among informers, torturers, and men who vanished without trace. He wrote blazing poetry by candlelight and carried state secrets by day. He drank with killers. He argued with atheists. He lived on the edge of the gallows. In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we foll...

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48:19

They Died for Applause, Inside the Life of a Gladiator

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/12/01

Send us a text Step inside the blood soaked heart of ancient Rome, where fame was forged in steel and death was sold as entertainment. From slaves and prisoners to superstars of the ancient world, gladiators lived brutally short lives beneath the roaring crowds of the Colosseum. In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we uncover who these men really were, how many truly died, how the games were staged, and why an empire became addicted to watching humans kill for spectacle. This is not...

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39:45

Hermann Göring - The Numerburg Trial

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/22

Send us a text Hermann Göring sat in the dock at Nuremberg draped in arrogance, still convinced that history might yet bend in his favour. Our latest episode peels back the veneer of the Reichsmarschall and exposes the unsettling truth that the man who helped forge a regime of industrial murder was not a monster from myth but an ordinary human being who revelled in power, vanity, and spectacle. We walk through the trial that should have broken him, the testimony that stripped away the last il...

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39:13

Regan - Let's Make America Great Again

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/14

Send us a text Ronald Reagan. The smiling cowboy president who told Americans he would make their country great again, long before that slogan returned to stalk the halls of power. But behind that easy grin was a far more complex figure, and in this episode I step into the darker rooms of his legacy. Reagan sold a dream of American renewal, but for many it came wrapped in fear, austerity, and a widening gulf between those who had plenty and those who were quietly abandoned. His tax cuts rewir...

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35:39

The British Raj Shattered - Five Partitions That...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2025/11/09

Send us a text In the span of just three decades, the British Raj fractured into five nations, each born in blood, hope, and fire. From Burma’s quiet separation in 1937 to the violent birth of Bangladesh in 1971, The Five Partitions tells the story of how one empire’s retreat redrew the map of Asia, and scarred its people forever. Millions died, tens of millions were displaced, and borders were carved through homes, hearts, and histories. Journey with Keith Hockton and Sam Dalrymple as ...

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145 results

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