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
In 1786, Francis Light raised the British flag over Penang and changed the history of the Malay Peninsula. But the deal behind it was far murkier than the familiar story suggests.
The Sultan of Kedah believed he was gaining British protection against powerful enemies. The East India Company wanted a strategic island on the route to China. Francis Light stood between them, allowing both sides to believe they were gett...
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 co...
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 impr...
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 wor...
They shattered convention with every stroke of the pen and brush—and tore through each other’s lives in the process.
The Bloomsbury Group wasn’t just a circle of intellectuals—it was a volatile mix of writers, artists, and thinkers who lived and loved on the edge of propriety. Virginia Woolf haunted the edges of genius and madness. Her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, reimagined beauty on her own...
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 ...
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 n...
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, an...
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 ever...
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 ...
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 ed...
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...
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...
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...
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'...
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 thr...
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 medi...
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 syste...
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 ...
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 jo...
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