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 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

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com

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 Britain’s most beloved novelists.

Austen’s stories are full of quiet rebellion. They appear genteel, polite—embroidered with bonnets and tea cups—but just beneath the surface, they bristle with sharp wit, social critique, and emotional precision. From Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion, her six novels reshaped the way we think about love, class, and character.

We’ll look at the world she lived in—the restrictions she faced as a woman, the heartbreaks she never quite wrote about, and the brilliance she poured into her work anyway. We’ll talk about the books, the brothers, the silence that followed her death, and the global fandom that exploded more than a century later.

This isn’t just a tale of romance and restraint. It’s about ambition in a corseted world. About the power of words to outlast even the quietest life.

So, pour yourself a cup of tea—or something stronger—and join me as we meet the real Jane Austen.

Referral Links:

Jane Austen

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com

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 burned. Many were dumped into the sea as colonial officials scrambled to hide the truth.

This wasn’t chaos. It was a cover-up. Cold. Calculated. And deliberate.

For decades, the survivors were gaslit. The atrocities denied. The Empire clung to its lies.

But truth has a way of surfacing.

Eventually, the British government was forced to admit it: the violence was systemic. The orders came from the top. And the damage ran deep.

They paid reparations. They issued an apology. And in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, a statue now stands—not in triumph, but in memory. A monument to pain, and to those who refused to be forgotten.

The silence is over. The reckoning begins.

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 reclaim stolen soil. For Britain, it was branded as savagery. But for the Kikuyu people, it was a desperate fight for survival.

In this episode, we follow historian Caroline Elkins as she digs into the origins of the rebellion. She uncovers the truth behind the British land grab that dispossessed entire communities. She exposes the empire’s network of detention camps, the calculated use of violence, and the system that turned colonial subjects into suspects—tortured, broken, and silenced.

And then, just as Elkins begins to unearth the full scale of the horror, the files begin to disappear. Archives once promised to researchers are suddenly missing.

Part Two is coming—and with it, the story of a cover-up so vast it reached into the heart of the British state.

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, even sanity itself.

She defied the norms of literature—and of love. Her affair with the dazzling Vita Sackville-West lit a fire in her, one that would burn through Orlando, one of the most radical love letters ever written. She challenged the novel. She challenged men. She challenged herself—until the pressure nearly consumed her.

But her voice never broke. And today, it still echoes—sharp, strange, necessary.
Because the world she feared—of silence, of erasure—is still here. And her words still cut through it.

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. Obsessive. He scoured ancient texts, The Bible. The Vedas. The Koran. Still no blue. Only silence. Except in Egypt, where the dead were painted in lapis and gods crossed sapphire skies. Why them, and no one else?

Because colour isn’t in the world. It’s in the mind. Filtered through flesh. Warped by biology. Shaped by time. You see three cones. A dog sees two. A mantis shrimp sees sixteen. Who sees reality?

This isn’t just about colour. It’s about perception. Control. Evolution. This is the story of a colour that didn’t exist—until we taught ourselves to see it.

And what else might be out there, hidden in plain sight?

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com

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 then, nothing.

No cry. No descent. No proof.

For nearly a century, the mountain has kept its secret. Did they stand atop the world before disappearing into its icy silence? Or did Everest take their lives before it gave them glory?

What remains are fragments: a torn sleeve, a pickaxe, a frozen body found decades too late. Whispers of a lost camera. A photo meant for the summit. And a question that haunts every climber who dares follow: Did they make it?

This is not just a story of exploration. It is a requiem. A riddle carved in ice. A slow echo from the Roof of the World—where history, ambition, and the cold devour everything.

Referral Links:

Mallory and Irvine

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com

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 smile and polished speeches, he lived a life built on contradictions. He saved lives in the Pacific, but couldn't rescue the Bay of Pigs. He stared down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet couldn’t control the chaos at home — or in his private life. There were whispers of affairs with starlets and spies, and shadows that followed him to the Oval Office.

This is the story of JFK: the myth, the man, and the secrets he took to the grave.

In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we dive into the contradictions, the courage, and the chaos. This is the story of JFK: legend, leader, and the man who captured the world’s imagination… even as he struggled to hold onto his own.

Referral Links:

JFK

For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com