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 also a proud Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and is on a mission to make history not only accessible but genuinely entertaining for everyone. His published books include: • Atlas of Australian Dive Sites - Travellers Edition (Harper Collins Australia, 2003). • Penang - An inside guide to its historic homes, buildings, monuments and parks (MPH Publishing, 2012; 2nd Edition 2014; 3rd Edition 2017). • Festivals of Malaysia (Trafalgar Publishing, 2015). • The Habitat Penang Hill: A pocket history (Entrepot Publishing, 2018) • Alana and the Secret Life of Trees at Night (Entrepot Publishing, 2018) • Penang Then & Now: A Century of Change in Pictures (Entrepot Publishing, 2019; 2nd Edition 2021 • Bersama Lima - Five Together (Entrepot Publishing, 2022) www.entrepotpublishing.com
Episodes
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, ...
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 o...
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...
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 t...
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...
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 ...
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 natio...
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 dea...
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&apo...
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 co...
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 g...
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.
Th...
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...
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 t...
In the 1660s, Isaac Newton sat alone in the dark—and drove a needle behind his eye. Not out of madness, but to understand light.
Centuries earlier, Homer described the sea not as blue, but wine-dark. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the colour blue is never mentioned. Not once.
This absence haunted William Gladstone. Scholar. Statesman. Obsessive. He scoured ancient texts, The Bible. The Vedas. The Koran. Still no blue. On...
High above the world, where the wind screams and the air itself turns hostile, two men vanished into legend.
In June 1924, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine ascended into the death zone of Mount Everest—draped not in modern gear, but in wool, hope, and obsession. They were last seen climbing toward the summit, swallowed by mist… and then, nothing.
No cry. No descent. No proof.
For nearly a century, the mountain has kept i...
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 t...
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 op...
How monstrous were Rome’s emperors? Was Caligula truly mad enough to declare war on the sea? Did Nero really watch Rome burn while playing his lyre? And were these men depraved by nature—or crafted that way by the sharpened pen of Suetonius?
In his Lives of the Caesars, written in 121 AD, Suetonius offers a series of intimate autopsies on power—twelve rulers, stripped bare. From Julius Caesar to the tyrant Domitian, we...
On a cold November night in 1974, blood was spilled in a Belgravia basement. Sandra Rivett, the nanny, was bludgeoned to death. The intended target, perhaps, was someone else. The killer vanished. So did Lord Lucan.
An aristocrat with a gambler’s charm and a predator’s instinct, Lucan stepped into the shadows and was never seen again. Did he die by his own hand? Or did the old world—the one of clubs, titles, and whispe...
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