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
Everyone knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Italian explorer. The New World. The map. Case closed.
Except it isn't.
Current research points to someone else entirely. Someone hiding in plain sight for five hundred years. Someone the history books never mention.
The answer, when it comes, is not what you'd expect. And once you hear it — you won't easily unhear it.
For books written a...
The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind.
In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang, Bali, Lombok, Malacca were not merely trading posts. They were the architecture of a system. A system designed to extract, to control, and to profit at any human cost necessary.
What...
What if the most valuable commodity on earth — more precious than gold, more coveted than silk — grew in just one place? Six tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Indonesian sea, surrounded by reefs, monsoons, and men willing to kill to keep it that way.
This is the story of nutmeg. The spice in your kitchen cupboard that once drove empires to war, sent Samuel Pepys to the docks at midnight to buy fr...
One man. A stolen map. The birth of modern capitalism.
In 1583, a young Dutchman talked his way into the heart of Portugal's Asian empire — and spent six years quietly copying its most jealously guarded secrets. Routes. Charts. The knowledge that underpinned a century of Portuguese dominance over the world's most lucrative trade.
When he sailed home, everything changed.
Within two decades, the Dutch had smashed t...
They flew wars that officially never happened. They built a nation that might not exist without them. They were civilians on paper and combat veterans in reality — and most of them came home to silence.
This is the final chapter of the trilogy that began with the Flying Tigers and the Hump crews, and continued through the collapse of Nationalist China, the birth of Civil Air Transport, and the long secret war s...
What happened to the legendary pilots of The Hump after the Second World War ended?
The answer is one of the most extraordinary and least known stories in aviation history.
From the battlefields of China to the jungles of Laos and Vietnam, the men who once flew supplies across the Himalayas followed General Claire Chennault into a new and secret war. Under the banners of CAT, Air America and Air Asia, they evacuated a...
The Flying Tigers became legends. The shark mouths. The dogfights. The mythology of fearless American pilots diving through the skies above China and Burma. But behind the glamour lay another war almost nobody remembers.
This is the story of The Hump crews, the exhausted transport pilots, navigators, mechanics, and bomber crews who flew through Himalayan storms carrying fuel, bombs, medicine, and hope into a collapsi...
What is the most extreme act of psychological warfare in history?
In 496 BC, the Chinese ruler King Goujian unveiled a tactic so shocking that it still resonates more than 2,500 years later.
In this episode of History’s Strangest Questions, we explore one of the most extraordinary examples of psychological warfare ever recorded, we examine how a commander sought to win a battle in the minds of his enemies ...
For nearly five centuries she has been remembered by a nickname: Bloody Mary. But was Mary Tudor really the monster history made her out to be? In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we look beyond the propaganda and meet the woman behind the legend.
From her childhood as the beloved daughter of Henry VIII, to her humiliation at the hands of Anne Boleyn, her dramatic seizure of the English throne, her m...
In the boiling summer of 1858 London nearly collapsed under the weight of its own filth. The Thames became an open sewer, Parliament could barely function through the stench, and thousands had already died from cholera.
Out of this nightmare came one of the greatest engineering triumphs in history. This is the story of The Great Stink, the crisis that transformed London forever and gave birth to the modern sewe...
The Koh i Noor is not just a diamond. It is a trail of blood stretching across centuries.
Murder, betrayal, empire, conquest, assassinations, collapsing kingdoms, and one tiny stone that still has the power to ignite arguments across half the world. From the massacres of Mughal Delhi to the Sikh Empire, from Afghanistan to Queen Victoria and the Tower of London, the “Mountain of Light” has left chaos almo...
Can a war last more than a century by accident? Why do some of history’s strangest stories sound completely impossible, yet turn out to be true? And how do forgotten laws, bizarre misunderstandings, and tiny historical footnotes sometimes become more fascinating than the great battles themselves?
In this new mini series from Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton explores the curious, darkly amusing, and utt...
Marie Antoinette still haunts history. Not because of the diamonds, the silk gowns, or the myth of “Let them eat cake”, but because beneath the powdered image was a real woman slowly being destroyed by revolution, propaganda, fear, and public hatred.
In this dark and gripping episode, we step beyond the caricature and into the private world of her letters, where a frightened Austrian teenager become...
What if the Christianity we know today was only one version among many?
In the earliest centuries after Jesus, Christianity was not a single unified faith but a chaotic world of rival gospels, competing prophets, strange miracles, and wildly different visions of who Jesus actually was. Some saw him as a gentle healer. Others described a frightening child capable of striking people dead. Entire Christian communities f...
They marched into the mists of Scotland… and something in those mists did not let them return.
The Legio IX Hispana had once been Rome at its most ruthless. Veterans of slaughter in Hispania, men who had learned to kill without hesitation, to burn without remorse. They were not easily broken. They were the instrument of empire, the edge of the blade.
But Scotland was different. Cold, wet, and watchful. A land t...
Tattoos are not really about ink. They are about memory, identity, and the quiet human need to leave a mark.
Across thousands of years, people have chosen to carve meaning into their own skin, sometimes as an act of devotion, sometimes of rebellion, sometimes of control. From the frozen body of Ötzi in the Alps to the courts of kings, from punishment to fashion, from the margins of society to its very centre, tattoos...
We step into the shadows of Southeast Asia, where beauty and violence sit side by side, and something begins to break. Vietnam is no longer a distant conflict. It is the place where power is tested, and found wanting.
This is not a story of victory. It is the story of a slow failure, measured in years, in lives, in decisions that cannot be undone. In the jungles and the cities, confidence turns to doubt, doubt to fea...
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 f...
They’ve been blamed for everything from world domination to hiding the Ark of the Covenant—yet they still can’t agree on who brings the biscuits to the meeting.
The Freemasons: part medieval guild, part secret society, part boys’ club with an obsession for aprons, compasses, and handshakes that no one outside the lodge is supposed to understand. For centuries, they’ve operated behind clo...
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 fr...
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