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Rearview Mirror Chronicles

Keith Hockton

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

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29 episodes
Avg 38 min
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Episodes 29

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S1 · E186
Yesterday · 31 min
Fibonacci - The Man Who Gave Us Zero
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 it in North Africa, brought it home, and published the book that changed everything. We'll follow his journey from Pisa's merchant houses to the courts of emperors. We'll solve the famous rabbit problem. And we'll discover why the sequence that bears his name appears throughout nature in ways that still astound us. This is the story of one merchant's son who gave the world the numbers we use every day. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E185
Tuesday · 30 min
The Year Summer Never Came
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 catastrophic explosion helped shape the modern world. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E184
September 9 · 50 min
Civilization in a Glass - How Wine Built the World
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 the story of who holds authority and who doesn't. From Roman banquets to the birth of culture as we know it, wine is the thread that ties human civilization together. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E183
September 3 · 16 min
Trump Is Nero. You're the Crowd.
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. And if you take the comparison seriously, you have to follow it all the way to the end, to what actually happened to Nero. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E182
September 1 · 47 min
Zulu — Shaka Zulu, Warrior King (Part Two)
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 carried into the making of the most formidable fighting machine Africa had ever seen. But we tell it with our eyes open — because almost everything the world "knows" about Shaka reaches us through two English adventurers, one of whom advised the other to make him "as bloodthirsty as you can… it helps sell the work." So we hold the whole contradictory man in view at once: genius and butcher, founder and tyrant, and follow his spear all the way to the hill called Isandlwana. A story of empire and invention, terror and grief, and, above all, of a boy and his mother, cast out together, a very long way from home. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E181
August 26 · 59 min
Zulu - The Day of the Dead Moon (Part One)
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 king who had done everything to avoid it, fought by an army the Empire had dismissed as savages and would never underestimate again. But it's also the story of a Welsh mother lying awake six thousand miles from the fighting, of a wall built from grain sacks and biscuit boxes, and of one young soldier who lived long enough to carry the whole vanished world into the age of the atom. We'll separate the legend from what actually happened, the provoked invasion, the medals handed out partly to change the subject, the "Welshness" that came afterward — and we'll try, at the end, to tell it true. Come for the battles. Stay for the woman in Brecon. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E179
August 22 · 59 min
Would You Survive a Day in the 14th Century?
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 who danced at weddings and earned their old age the hard way. Could you survive a single day? The bar, I promise you, isn't high. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E180
August 22 · 12 min
The Durian: Four Hundred Years of Arguement
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 for yourself. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E178
August 17 · 9 min
History’s Strangest Questions: Was a Lord of the Realm Hanged for a Comma?
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 myth from what really happened: the humanitarian who became an Irish rebel, the unpunctuated 1351 law argued over word by word, the "Black Diaries" that drained away all sympathy, and the question that still splits opinion, traitor, or martyr? Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E177
August 13 · 18 min
The Penang Riots of 1867 - George Town at War
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 building for years caught fire. What followed was ten days of bloodshed in the streets of George Town, and a terrifying glimpse of just how little control the British actually had over their own colony. A story of secret societies, guns, money, murder and power. And the strangest beginning to a riot you are ever likely to hear. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E175
August 11 · 38 min
The Wrath of Khan - The Making of Genghis Khan (Part One)
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, intelligence networks, terrifying discipline, psychological warfare and tactics that allowed a relatively small army to overwhelm some of the richest and most powerful civilizations on earth. This is the story of how an outcast boy from the steppe became Genghis Khan, and how he built an army that would change the world. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E176
August 11 · 41 min
The Wrath of Khan: When Hell Rode West (Part Two)
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 reaches almost to the gates of Vienna. Even Genghis Khan’s death could not stop it. His sons and grandsons would more than double the size of his empire, conquer Russia, sack Baghdad and rule China. But this is also where the Mongol story becomes far more complicated. The same empire that built pyramids of skulls also made the Silk Road safer than it had been for centuries. Trade flourished. Religions were tolerated. Knowledge, inventions and ideas moved between East and West on an unprecedented scale. And along those same roads eventually travelled something else: the plague that became the Black Death. Were the Mongols uniquely savage, or simply more efficient at the brutal business of medieval conquest? Were they destroyers, empire builders, or both? And if the abandoned boy Temüjin had died on the frozen steppe as a child, how different would our world be today? Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E95
August 9 · 1 hr 3 min
La Belle Époque - An Age of Opulence and Illusion
Send us Fan Mail 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 conversation. But beneath the beauty, the city is cracking. Bombs explode in cafés. Anarchists lurk in shadowed rooms. The ghosts of the Paris Commune haven’t left—they’re just quieter now. Revolution lingers like smoke in the air. La Belle Époque. A time of elegance, excess—and unease. The world is dancing, blindfolded, toward the abyss. Welcome to Paris, on the edge of the modern world. referred Links: La Belle Époque Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E174
August 1 · 46 min
The Odyssey Explained: Why Homer's Epic Still Matters
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 why The Odyssey became the blueprint for countless stories that followed, from The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars to modern cinema. Along the way, you'll discover the hidden meanings behind Odysseus's trials, the remarkable intelligence of Penelope, the tragic misunderstandings surrounding Calypso, and how centuries of translation have subtly reshaped the women of both Greek mythology and the Bible. This isn't simply the story of a hero battling monsters. It's the story that taught the Western world how to tell stories, and why, after 3,000 years, Homer's timeless masterpiece still speaks directly to us today. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E77
July 30 · 45 min
The Madman’s Library: Bound in Flesh, Written in Blood
Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the Madman’s Library—a place not of learning, but of unraveling. Here, books do not enlighten. They whisper. They bleed. They rot. Grimoires etched in rust-black ink speak in tongues never meant for human mouths. Manuscripts stitched from flayed skin stare back with hollowed faces. Blood-written ravings of prophets long dead pulse with delusion, disease, and dread. This is a collection shaped not by reason, but by obsession. By the need to conjure, to control, to curse. Each spine cracked open reveals another step down, into the occult, the forbidden, the grotesque theater of human thought gone feral. These are not books. They are relics of ruin. Join Keith as he unlocks the vaults of the Madman’s Library, a curated descent into the psychosis of print, where knowledge cuts deeper than any blade, and reading is not an act of curiosity…but a pact with darkness. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E173
July 27 · 32 min
The Quiet Revolutionary: Vermeer, Pearls, and the Company That Bought the World
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 continue to captivate millions. But this is more than the story of an artist. It is also the story of the Dutch East India Company, the world's first multinational corporation, whose vast trading empire transformed a small nation into the richest on Earth and created the remarkable world in which Vermeer painted. Along the way, uncover the truth behind the famous pearl, the forgotten genius rediscovered centuries later, the astonishing forgeries that fooled the world's experts, and the hidden cost of the Dutch Golden Age. It's a fascinating journey through art, commerce, empire and humanity, revealing why a man who painted only thirty-five pictures still has the power to change the way we see the world. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E172
July 24 · 47 min
They Took the Children: How a Nation Tried to Erase a People
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 residential school system, reveals the political thinking that created it, and explores the devastating human cost that continues to echo through generations. Drawing on survivor testimony, historical records and the remarkable story of Kamloops, he examines one of the darkest chapters in Canadian history with honesty, compassion and historical perspective. Yet this is not simply a story of tragedy. It is also a story of extraordinary courage. Despite everything that was done to them, Indigenous children whispered their languages in secret, protected their traditions, and carried their cultures forward against overwhelming odds. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E171
July 20 · 48 min
The Elephant in the Nursery: What Children's Books Really Tell Us
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 tucked between the pages of our favourite bedtime stories. Why did a gentle elephant in a green suit become the centre of fierce debates about colonialism? How did two outsiders create the most patriotic French comic of the twentieth century? And what should we do when cherished childhood books contain ideas that modern readers find deeply uncomfortable? Warm, thought-provoking and often surprising, this episode explores the remarkable lives of the authors behind these timeless stories while asking a bigger question: are children's books ever really just for children? You'll never look at your childhood bookshelf in quite the same way again. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
July 17 · 8 min
History’s Strangest Questions: Who Was The Man Who Accidentally Poisoned the Planet?
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. It's a story of innovation, unintended consequences, and one of the most astonishing twists of fate in history. Sometimes, the people who change the world the most are the ones you've never even heard of. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com
S1 · E170
July 17 · 25 min
The Bill of Rights: The Shield Against Tyranny (Part Three)
Send us Fan Mail The American Revolution had been won. The Constitution had been written. But for millions of Americans, one vital question remained unanswered: who would protect the people from their own government? In this concluding chapter of our three part series on America's founding documents, we explore the remarkable story behind the Bill of Rights, ten amendments born not from certainty, but from fear, compromise, and political necessity. Discover why James Madison, a man who initially believed such a document was unnecessary, became its reluctant author, and how these ten amendments transformed the Constitution from a blueprint for government into a shield for individual liberty. From freedom of speech and religion to the right to bear arms, trial by jury, privacy, and the limits of government power, we examine the origins of each amendment and why they remain at the centre of America's fiercest constitutional battles. More than two centuries later, the questions they raise are as urgent and divisive as ever. The Bill of Rights was written to guard against tyranny. Whether it still does so, and what tyranny looks like in the twenty first century, is a debate that has never truly ended. Support the show For books written and published by Keith Hocton www.entrepotpublishing.com

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