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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

41:26

The Emergency: Fear, Fire, and the Making of Modern...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/25

Send us Fan Mail It doesn’t begin with a declaration of war. It begins with unease. In the humid aftermath of the Second World War, British Malaya looks stable on the surface, plantations hum, the Union Jack flies once more, and the machinery of empire creaks back into life. But beneath it, something is shifting. Armed resistance fighters, once backed by the British, now turn against them. A divided society begins to fracture further. And in the shadows of the jungle, a new kind of war is alr...

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14:42

Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Ambassadors (Part...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/19

Send us Fan Mail Step into the quiet grandeur of the National Gallery and come face to face with one of the most unsettling masterpieces ever painted, The Ambassadors. At first, it appears to be a portrait of wealth, power, and Renaissance confidence, two men surrounded by the instruments of knowledge and discovery. But look closer, and the painting begins to shift. What seems orderly becomes fragile. What feels certain begins to fracture. Because hidden within the composition, quite literall...

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14:13

Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Garden of Earthly...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/19

Send us Fan Mail There are paintings you admire… and then there are paintings that quietly take hold of you, refusing to let go. The Garden of Earthly Delights is firmly in the latter camp. Set within the shadowed grandeur of the Museo del Prado, this extraordinary triptych unfolds not as a simple artwork, but as a riddle that has haunted viewers for over five centuries. In this episode, we step into Bosch’s strange and intoxicating world, a place where paradise feels uneasy, pleasure feels d...

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16:03

Masterpieces and Mysteries - The Arnolfini Portrait:...

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/17

Send us Fan Mail What if the world’s most famous paintings are not what they seem? In this series, Masterpieces and Mysteries steps beyond the frame to uncover the hidden stories behind some of history’s greatest works of art. These are not just paintings, they are moments caught in the act, filled with symbols, secrets, and unanswered questions that have lingered for centuries. From whispered marriages to vanishing empires, from distorted skulls to fleeting love, each episode invites you to ...

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72:41

Harald Hardrada - Viking, Mercenary, King (Part Two)

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/15

Send us Fan Mail Exile. Warrior. Something more than a man. In Part Two, Harald Hardrada arrives in Constantinople, the greatest city on earth, and enters the brutal, glittering world of the Varangian Guard. What follows is a life lived at the edge, war in the Aegean, sieges in the east, and the dangerous intrigue of an empire where power shifts overnight. Wealth flows, reputations grow, and somewhere between fact and saga, Harald begins to transform into legend. But nothing here is simple. S...

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67:08

Viking, Mercenary, King (Part One)

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/10

Send us Fan Mail Before 1066, before Stamford Bridge, before he became a legend, Harald Hardrada was a boy standing in a collapsing shield wall, watching his world burn. Wounded, hunted, and forced into exile, he vanishes east into a vast and dangerous world of rivers, warbands, and shifting loyalties. He fights in the courts of the Kievan Rus, then pushes further south, into the glittering, treacherous heart of Constantinople, where emperors rise and fall and survival is never guaranteed. He...

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56:01

The Peaky Blinders

Rearview Mirror Chronicles ·

2026/04/05

Send us Fan Mail Birmingham told itself it was a city of progress. Industry, pride, invention. But beneath the smoke lay something far darker, cramped streets, shared poverty, and young men learning that survival meant violence. They were not heroes. Not legends. They were products of their world, brutal, territorial, and feared most by their own neighbours. This is the real story of the Peaky Blinders, stripped of myth and romance, from backstreet gangs to organised crime, where violence bec...

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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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152 results

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