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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

35:34

Gallipoli

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/30

Send us Fan Mail In April 1915, thousands of young Australians and New Zealanders approached an unfamiliar Turkish coastline in small boats. Most had never been under fire. Within hours, a new word would enter history: ANZAC. Gallipoli was supposed to be a bold shortcut to victory, a way through the Dardanelles to Constantinople and Russia. Instead, it became eight months of slaughter, disease, impossible terrain and extraordinary courage. This is the story of the men who landed at ANZAC Cove...

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51:54

The Knights Templar: The King, the Curse and the Lost...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/24

Send us Fan Mail They began as a handful of armed monks protecting pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. Within two centuries, the Knights Templar had become one of the most powerful organisations in medieval Europe, warriors, landowners, financiers and servants of kings and popes. Then, on Friday the 13th of October 1307, everything changed. Across France, Templars were arrested in a single coordinated operation. Their leaders were imprisoned, accusations of heresy and blasphemy followed, and b...

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11:16

Bloomsbury Ley Lines - The Tangled Web

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/19

Send us Fan Mail The Bloomsbury Group were writers, artists, thinkers and intellectuals who helped reshape twentieth century culture. But behind the books, paintings and radical ideas was something altogether more complicated. The more you follow their lives, the more tangled the story becomes. Marriages overlapped with affairs. Friendships became love affairs. Lovers became members of the family. And just when you think you have worked out who was with whom, another name appears and the whol...

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31:45

Fibonacci - The Man Who Gave Us Zero

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/17

Send us Fan Mail Fibonacci is famous for rabbits. But that's not why he matters. His real name was Leonardo of Pisa. In 1202, he did something that quietly reshaped civilization: he taught Europe to count. He brought the Hindu-Arabic numerals, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, from the Islamic world to the West. Every price tag, every bank statement, every calculator you've ever used owes something to him. Medieval merchants using Roman numerals had no idea a better way existed. Leonardo learned ...

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30:07

The Year Summer Never Came

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/15

Send us Fan Mail In June 1816, a New England farmer woke to find snow falling on his summer crops. Ten thousand miles away, an Indonesian volcano had exploded, and what it threw into the sky was about to change the world. This is the story of Mount Tambora's eruption, the year summer never arrived, and the unexpected consequences that rippled across continents: failed harvests, mass migration, literature's greatest monsters, and even the invention of the bicycle. Discover how one catast...

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50:50

Civilization in a Glass - How Wine Built the World

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/09

Send us Fan Mail What gives a freedman the power to insult an emperor? The answer lies in a single sentence spoken over a glass of wine nearly two thousand years ago. Wine isn't just what people drink, it's what built empires, shaped trade routes, and determined who gets to decide what counts as good. In this episode, we explore how wine became the silent architect of civilization itself, tracing the power dynamics hidden inside every vintage, and uncovering why the story of wine is really th...

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16:52

Nero Is Now — Trump, the Crowd, and Why History Repeats

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/03

Send us Fan Mail Rome is burning, and the Emperor is on stage, singing. We all know the image. But what if Nero isn't history, what if Nero is now? In this episode, historian Keith Hockton draws a line from Nero's Rome to Trump's America, through a single wrestling word that explains why facts don't work, why supporters cheer the wreckage, and why "bread and circuses" is a warning we never actually learned. Some parallels in history are vague. This one is standing right in front of us, waving...

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47:02

Zulu — Shaka, Warrior King (Part Two)

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/09/01

Send us Fan Mail An outcast boy with no right to anything took a cattle-clan of a few thousand souls and, inside a single lifetime, forged it into a nation, one strong enough, sixty years after his death, to hand the British Empire the worst defeat it had ever suffered on a battlefield. In Part Two we go back to the beginning: to a fatherless child mocked with a name that meant beetle, cast out with his mother Nandi to live at the edge of someone else's fire, and to the cold rage that boy car...

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59:56

Zulu - The Day of the Dead Moon (Part One)

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/26

Send us Fan Mail On a single afternoon in January 1879, in a corner of southern Africa most of the men fighting there could not have found on a map, the British Empire suffered the worst defeat in its history, and, a few miles away, under the same sky, fought the most celebrated last stand it ever told stories about. One catastrophe and one miracle, side by side, beneath the same darkening sun. This is the story of the Anglo-Zulu War: a war nobody in London had quite authorised, against a kin...

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59:56

Would You Survive a Day in the 14th Century?

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/22

Send us Fan Mail How hard was it, really, just to stay alive in the fourteenth century? You wake up in an English village around 1350 and find out, one hazard at a time. The smoke-filled house. The sewer you drink from. The splinter that becomes a grave. The law that tells you what to wear, and the plague is waiting at the far edge of the century to erase half of everyone you know. But this isn't just a catalogue of horrors: it's the story of resilient, funny, gloriously alive people wh...

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12:02

The Durian: Four Hundred Years of Arguement

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/22

Send us Fan Mail They banned it from the trains. They barred it from the hotels. And still they called it the King of Fruits. For four hundred years the durian split every traveller who ate it clean in two, one gagging at rotten onions, the next melting over custard, almonds and brown sherry, and somehow the argument never ended. Heaven or horror? Was it the finest fruit on earth, or foulest? This is a short history of the world's most divisive fruit, and an invitation to decide f...

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9:41

History’s Strangest Questions: Was a Lord of the...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/17

Send us Fan Mail In 1911, the British Crown knighted Roger Casement for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon. Five years later, the same government hanged him for treason. Ever since, people have said he was "hanged on a comma", that a single mark of punctuation in a 565-year-old medieval statute sent a knight of the British Empire to the gallows. It's one of the most famous stories in legal history. And it's not quite true. In this short, Keith Hockton untangles the...

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17:06

The Penang Riots of 1867 - George Town at War

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/13

Send us Fan Mail George Town, 1867. Beneath the British flag, another power ruled the streets. Secret societies commanded thousands of men. Money flowed through opium, gambling and the revenue farms. Loyalties ran deeper than the law, and behind the respectable façade of colonial Penang was a world of violence, fear and sworn brotherhoods. Then, one afternoon, a man looked over a fence. Someone accused him of being a thief. Someone threw a rambutan. And suddenly, the powder keg that had been ...

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41:12

The Wrath of Khan: When Hell Rode West (Part Two)

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/11

Send us Fan Mail Genghis Khan didn't want the war that would become the most devastating campaign of his life. It began with a trade caravan, the murder of hundreds of merchants, and one spectacularly arrogant decision by a ruler who had no idea who he was dealing with. In Part Two of The Wrath of Khan, we follow the Mongol war machine as it tears through the wealthy Khwarazmian Empire, destroys some of the greatest cities of the medieval world, rides across the frozen rivers of Russia and re...

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38:57

The Wrath of Khan - The Making of Genghis Khan (Part...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/09

Send us Fan Mail A boy abandoned on the frozen Mongolian steppe should have died there. Instead, he survived to become Genghis Khan, the ruler who would unleash the most formidable war machine the medieval world had ever seen. In Part One of The Wrath of Khan, we follow the extraordinary rise of Temüjin from a childhood of starvation, betrayal and slavery to his unification of the Mongol tribes. Then we look inside the military system he created: merit over birth, unmatched horsemanship, inte...

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46:04

The Odyssey Explained: Why Homer's Epic Still Matters

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/08/01

Send us Fan Mail For nearly three thousand years, Homer's Odyssey has captivated audiences with its unforgettable monsters, legendary heroes, and epic adventures. But beneath the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the wrath of the gods lies a far deeper story—one about family, loyalty, temptation, pride, and the universal longing to return home. In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton takes you on an extraordinary journey through one of history's greatest masterpieces, revealing wh...

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32:04

The Quiet Revolutionary: Vermeer, Pearls, and the...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/07/27

Send us Fan Mail What if one of history's greatest painters wasn't simply creating beautiful pictures, but quietly capturing the birth of the modern world? In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith explores the extraordinary life of Johannes Vermeer, the elusive Dutch master who painted fewer than forty works before dying in debt. Journey from the luminous mystery of Girl with a Pearl Earring to the quiet dignity of The Milkmaid, discovering why these seemingly ordinary paintings c...

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47:24

They Took the Children: How a Nation Tried to Erase a...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/07/24

Send us Fan Mail For more than a century, one of the world's most admired democracies carried out a policy that sought to erase Indigenous cultures by removing their children. More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit boys and girls were taken from their families, stripped of their language, traditions and identity, and sent to residential schools where many endured hunger, abuse, neglect and unimaginable loneliness. In this deeply moving episode, Keith traces the origins of Canada's r...

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48:28

The Elephant in the Nursery: What Children's Books...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/07/20

Send us Fan Mail There are books that shape our childhood, and then there are books that quietly shape the way we see the world. In this fascinating episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton takes a fresh look at some of the most beloved children's classics ever written. From the tragic bedside story that gave the world Babar the Elephant, to the immigrant creators who invented France's greatest comic hero, Asterix, this is a journey through history, culture and the hidden messages...

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8:40

History’s Strangest Questions: Who Was The Man Who...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/07/17

Send us Fan Mail What if the person who caused the greatest environmental damage in human history wasn't a dictator, a conqueror, or a ruthless industrialist... but a brilliant engineer trying to make the world a better place? In this episode of History's Strangest Questions, we uncover the extraordinary and deeply ironic story the man whose inventions transformed modern life while unintentionally poisoning millions of people and then helped destroy something very important to our planet.&nbs...

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