Best Keith Hockton Podcasts (2025)

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The Colosseum: Power, Glory, and Death 1:02:29

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2h ago1:02:29

1:02:29

Send us a text For nearly 2,000 years, this colossal arena has stood as Rome’s most breathtaking monument to spectacle, power, and blood. In its day, the Colosseum wasn’t just a stadium—it was a machine built for awe. Here emperors staged games that made the entire empire gasp: gladiators battling to the death, wild beasts from Africa unleashed bef…

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Edinburgh Castle: Scotland’s Dark Heart 27:42

2d ago27:42

27:42

Send us a text Picture this. You’re standing on a black volcanic rock, the wind clawing at your coat, the sound of bagpipes drifting faintly from somewhere down on the Royal Mile. Ahead of you, looming over the city like a brooding giant, is Edinburgh Castle. Its stone walls, scarred by centuries of fire, rebellion, and siege, rise from the crag as…

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Notre Dame: The Soul of Paris 43:48

16d ago43:48

43:48

Send us a text Bells ringing across the Paris skyline, echoing over the Seine, rolling like thunder through eight centuries of history. At the very heart of the city, at the heart of France itself, stands a masterpiece: Notre Dame. It has seen kings crowned, revolutions rage, and fire nearly bring it to its knees. This isn’t just a cathedral. It is…

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The Congo - Leopolds Downfall - Part Three 54:10

22d ago54:10

54:10

Send us a text In the final chapter of our Congo series, King Leopold’s dark empire begins to unravel. From the Antwerp docks, a young shipping clerk named Edmund Dene Morel uncovers a deadly secret, a trade built not on goods, but on guns, blood, and severed hands. His relentless campaign, joined by the voice of Roger Casement and the pen of Mark …

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The Congo - A Society of Murderers - Part Two 1:15:36

29d ago1:15:36

1:15:36

Send us a text Picking up from the blood-soaked ivory trails of Part One, Part Two plunges deeper into King Leopold’s private empire as the hunger for profit shifts from elephant tusks to an even deadlier harvest, rubber. The bicycle boom and the rise of the motor car in Europe turn the Congo’s wild vines into gold, but every drop of latex is wrung…

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The Congo - The Nightmare Begins - Part One 1:12:49

1M ago1:12:49

1:12:49

Send us a text It is one of the darkest chapters in human history, and yet—astonishingly—one of the least known. At the turn of the 20th century, deep in the uncharted heart of Africa, a vast swathe of land nearly eighty times the size of Belgium was transformed into a private slaughterhouse. Not by an empire. Not by a government. But by a single m…

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Bond - James Bond, and his Watches 20:23

1M ago20:23

20:23

Send us a text There’s a reason James Bond makes an entrance like no one else. The tuxedo, the swagger, the one-liners that land like bullets, and of course, the watch. Always the watch. Because in the world of 007, it’s never just about telling the time. Bond’s watches have done more than tick. They’ve detonated charges, fired lasers, unzipped wet…

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Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury - The Bone Merchant 45:34

2M ago45:34

45:34

Send us a text Late Tudor and early Stuart England was a world of whispers and daggers, where faith could cost you your head and loyalty was a currency more precious than gold. It was a time of espionage, betrayal, and uneasy succession, a kingdom teetering between glorious legacy and looming uncertainty. And into that dangerous world stepped a man…

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Diana Unfiltered: Beyond the Fairy Tale 51:16

2M ago51:16

51:16

Send us a text Today, we’re stepping into the shimmering, storm-tossed world of Diana, Princess of Wales, queen of hearts, icon of our age. But forget what you think you know. Because Diana’s story, as told in Edward White’s Dianaworld, isn’t a fairy tale, and it’s certainly not the tabloid spectacle we’ve grown used to. It’s something far more int…

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Vietnam: The Unwinnable War 57:18

2M ago57:18

57:18

Send us a text Tonight, we enter the shadows of Southeast Asia, where the scent of frangipani drifts through streets haunted by war and secrets. Vietnam is about to become the battleground not just for armies, but for ideals and egos, each choice pulling the world deeper into chaos. This isn’t just a story of generals and politicians, it’s the slow…

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The Golden Age of Japan - The Pillow Book 53:12

2M ago53:12

53:12

Send us a text 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 …

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The Golden Age of Japan - The Tale of Genji 57:30

3M ago57:30

57:30

Send us a text 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 en…

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Mary Shelley: Mother of Monsters 1:02:35

3M ago1:02:35

1:02:35

Send us a text 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 ju…

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The Mitfords Revisited: Saints, Sinners, and Scandal 19:07

3M ago19:07

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Send us a text 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 …

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Kew: The Garden That Changed the World 45:21

3M ago45:21

45:21

Send us a text 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 Ga…

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Master of Shadows: The Ruthless World of Robert Cecil 47:31

3M ago47:31

47:31

Send us a text 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 hea…

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Canadian Beaver Wars: Blood on the Snow 41:27

3M ago41:27

41:27

Send us a text 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…

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The Brontë Sisters 27:14

3M ago27:14

27:14

Send us a text 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 worl…

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Canada - The 51st State? 52:29

3M ago52:29

52:29

Send us a text 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 Wa…

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La Belle Époque 1:03:55

4M ago1:03:55

1:03:55

Send us a text 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…

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Wit as Weapon: Jane Austen’s Disarming Charm 48:04

4M ago48:04

48:04

Send us a text 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 Brita…

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The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part Two 43:40

4M ago43:40

43:40

Send us a text 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 bu…

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The Mau Mau - Empire of Blood - Part One 47:46

4M ago47:46

47:46

Send us a text 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 recl…

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Bloomsbury’s Broken Light - Virginia Woolf 49:17

4M ago49:17

49:17

Send us a text 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, eve…

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The Colour That Haunted History 42:55

4M ago42:55

42:55

Send us a text 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.…

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Mallory and Irvine - Ghosts on Everest 52:20

5M ago52:20

52:20

Send us a text 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 t…

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John F. Kennedy: The Man Who Dared to Dream 55:59

5M ago55:59

55:59

Send us a text 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 sm…

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Nicholas Flamel: The Immortal Alchemist 40:32

5M ago40:32

40:32

Send us a text 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 cent…

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Thrones of Blood: Rome’s Darkest Emperors 30:01

6M ago30:01

30:01

Send us a text 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 autopsi…

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The Lord Lucan File: Blood, Shadows, and Silence 35:42

6M ago35:42

35:42

Send us a text 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…

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Three Scots in Africa - Slave, Slaver, Abolitionist 47:55

6M ago47:55

47:55

Send us a text Today’s journey takes us deep into the heart of Africa – a continent rich in culture, but ravaged by the forces of empire, greed… and the struggle for humanity. Sir John Henderson – the nobleman who was a slave. Richard Oswald – Politician and slaver, and Dr. David Livingstone – the missionary, explorer, and abolitionist, whose foots…

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Tolkien – Part Two: When the World Was Young 1:02:30

6M ago1:02:30

1:02:30

Send us a text Last time, we traced the scars of war across Tolkien’s early life. Now, we enter the shadow of The Lord of the Rings—a tale forged in the mud of the trenches and tempered by death, faith, and memory. Middle-earth is not fantasy—it’s a reckoning. Its wars echo the shell-blasted fields of World War I. Its darkness mirrors the despair T…

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Tolkien – Part One: When the World Was Young 54:07

6M ago54:07

54:07

Send us a text In the quiet corners of a small English town, in the flickering glow of candlelight, a boy loses himself in the pages of myth and legend—unaware that one day, his own words will shape the greatest fantasy saga ever written. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien… a name that would one day transport millions to the lands of elves, dwarves, and dra…

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Malta - The Greatest Siege in History 47:45

7M ago47:45

47:45

Send us a text Picture this: A sun-scorched island in the heart of the Mediterranean. A desperate band of knights, vastly outnumbered, stands against the might of an empire. It is the year 1565, and the Ottoman war machine—30,000 strong—has arrived on the shores of Malta, determined to wipe the Knights of St. John off the face of the earth. But wha…

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Nostradamus: The Prophet of Shadows 33:50

7M ago33:50

33:50

Send us a text For centuries, the shadow of Nostradamus has stretched across history like a curse. His cryptic quatrains, etched in riddles and veiled in doom, have been blamed—and believed—for the rise of tyrants, the fall of empires, and disasters still unfolding. Did he truly foresee Napoleon’s bloody ascent? The fires of World War II? The tower…

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Banking Collapses: When Empires Eat Themselves 35:32

7M ago35:32

35:32

Send us a text Money builds empires. But when it dies, it drags entire civilizations down with it. From the marble halls of ancient Rome to the glass towers of modern Wall Street, financial collapse has haunted humanity like a recurring nightmare. In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we open the vault on three devastating meltdowns: a liq…

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Greenland: Strategic, Silent, Surging 36:57

7M ago36:57

36:57

Send us a text Greenland isn’t just ice and isolation—it’s one of the most strategically coveted places on Earth. Home to the Inuit for over 4,500 years, and later the Norse led by Erik the Red, Greenland has always drawn those bold—or desperate—enough to brave its brutal Arctic edge. The Norse colonies mysteriously vanished by the 15th century, bu…

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The Madman’s Library: Bound in Flesh, Written in Blood 45:10

7M ago45:10

45:10

Send us a text 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 de…

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Panama Canal: A Corridor of Corpses 34:48

8M ago34:48

34:48

Send us a text The Panama Canal wasn't built, it was bled into existence. What began in the 1880s as a grand French dream quickly unraveled into a nightmare. Led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who conquered the Suez, workers fell by the thousands, claimed by malaria, yellow fever, and the jungle itself. The earth collapsed. The money vanished. An…

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Greatness Demands Blood 31:28

8M ago31:28

31:28

Send us a text What does it mean to be great—truly great? Once, the title was thundered through history: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great. It meant something vast, undeniable—power, vision, audacity, and impact that bent the world. But today? The word feels… dusty. Loaded. Hesitant. In this episode, Keith asks the uncomfort…

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Alexander: The Shadow Before the Storm – Part Two 55:56

8M ago55:56

55:56

Send us a text As Alexander the Great marched into the scorched lands of India, his ambition had become something more than hunger, it was obsession. At the banks of the Hydaspes, he faced King Porus and a wall of war elephants, beasts bred for terror and destruction. The battle was brutal, primal—thunder, blood, and chaos. But Alexander won. He al…

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Alexander: The Shadow Before the Storm – Part One 54:02

8M ago54:02

54:02

Send us a text Born in blood and prophecy in 356 BC, Alexander of Macedonia was never meant for peace. His mother, Olympias, whispered of divine ancestry and Achilles’ blood. His father, Philip II, carved an empire from fractured tribes and raised a son who would not just inherit a kingdom—but demand the world. Tutored by Aristotle, trained by war,…

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The Great Fire of London - The Ashes of 1666 40:21

9M ago40:21

40:21

Send us a text In the early hours of September 1666, a single spark in a baker’s shop ignited an unstoppable force—one that would consume the very soul of London. Within days, fire swallowed over 13,000 homes, St. Paul’s Cathedral crumbled in flames, and the sky above the Thames burned red. But this was more than a fire. It was judgment. It was rec…

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Christmas: A Spell Cast in Time 34:52

9M ago34:52

34:52

Send us a text From humble beginnings in a Bethlehem stable to the firelit pages of Dickensian London… from the legend of a gift-giving bishop who became Santa Claus to the thunderous silence of the trenches on Christmas Day 1914, where enemies became men and played football in no-man’s-land—we uncover the heart of a holiday that refuses to be forg…

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The Colosseum: Theatre of Human Ruin 53:01

9M ago53:01

53:01

Send us a text Step into the shadow of ancient Rome, where blood was currency, death was performance, and the roar of 50,000 voices could drown a man’s final scream. The Colosseum was no mere arena—it was a killing ground dressed as theatre, where emperors fed the mob with flesh and fire, and where the line between glory and oblivion was drawn in s…

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Persia: The First Superpower 44:45

9M ago44:45

44:45

Send us a text Persia—land of fire, kings, and legends—was no ordinary empire. It was the original superpower: vast, visionary, and astonishingly ahead of its time. From the shores of the Mediterranean to the banks of the Indus, it stitched together a world of cultures, languages, and faiths under the bold, unifying rule of Cyrus the Great. Here, t…

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Kipling’s Shadow: The Dark Wisdom of 'If—' and 'The Two-Sided Man 8:44

10M ago8:44

8:44

Send us a text Rudyard Kipling’s If— and The Two-Sided Man aren’t just poems—they’re survival guides wrapped in verse. Fierce, honest, and deeply human, they capture the struggle to stay balanced in a world constantly pulling us apart. In this episode, Keith dives into the raw beauty of these two masterworks—and shares why they’ve stayed with him t…

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Sliding Doors of History 55:00

10M ago55:00

55:00

Send us a text What if history didn’t have to end the way it did? What ifs, those tantalising counterfactuals, are more than thought experiments. They’re portals into the unknown, where a single decision, a missed arrow, or a failed winter campaign could have rewritten the world. What if Alexander the Great had lived just ten more years? What if Na…

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Sea Wolf Rising – Part Three 53:22

10M ago53:22

53:22

Send us a text In the fading light of empire, Lord Thomas Cochrane stood not as a relic—but as a scar that refused to fade. Once branded a traitor, imprisoned, and cast into disgrace, Cochrane should have disappeared into the margins of history. Instead, he became something more dangerous: unbound. Exiled from the Royal Navy, he sailed for foreign …

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Sea Wolf Rising – Part Two 59:08

11M ago59:08

59:08

Send us a text It was nightfall when hell was unleashed on the sea. In 1809, Thomas Lord Cochrane—brilliant, reckless, and already feared—led a fleet of fire and bomb ships into the mouth of the Basque Roads. The French fleet lay anchored and complacent. Within moments, they were in chaos. Cochrane’s infernal vessels, packed with explosives and fla…