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In December 1914, in the frozen mud between the trenches, something astonishing happened.

The war paused.

On the Western Front, beneath a hard winter sky, British and German soldiers began to sing. First carols drifted across No Man’s Land. Then cautious voices answered. And then, in an act so simple it feels almost impossible, men climbed out of their trenches.

They shook hands. They exchanged cigarettes. They buried their dead.

And somewhere in that scarred, cratered wasteland, a football appeared.

This episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles tells the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914, not as myth, not as sentiment, but as a moment of fragile humanity inside the machinery of industrial war. Who organised it, if anyone did? Was there really a match? And why did high command move so swiftly to ensure it never happened again?

For a few brief hours, enemies became players. The rifles fell silent. Boots struck a ball instead of the earth. And the war, just for Christmas, seemed to loosen its grip.

It is a story of mud, music, youth, and memory. And a reminder that even in the darkest winters of history, something stubbornly human survives.

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For most of human history, time was a local affair. Noon was when the sun sat highest in the sky, and every town lived by its own clock. Then, quietly and decisively, one place changed everything.

In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we travel to Royal Observatory Greenwich, the unlikely hilltop that became the centre of global time. We explore how astronomers, clockmakers, sailors, and empire builders wrestled with the problem of longitude, why a single line drawn across a courtyard came to rule the world’s clocks, and how Greenwich Mean Time emerged not as a law of nature, but as a human agreement, fragile, contested, and revolutionary.

This is the story of precision and power, of pendulums and stars, of railways, navies, and modern life falling into sync. From sun dials to atomic seconds, from local noon to global coordination, Greenwich became the place where time itself was standardised.

Stand with one foot in the east and one in the west, and listen in, because this is the moment the world decided what time it really was.

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For books written and published by Keith Hocton

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Some books refuse to be read.
They arrive without an author, without a key, sometimes without even a recognisable language, and then sit there, daring us to make sense of them.

In this episode, we step into the shadowy world of mysterious manuscripts, texts written in ciphers no one can crack, alphabets that belong to no known culture, and pages filled with symbols, diagrams, and illustrations that feel deliberate, intelligent, and utterly alien. From books that seem to straddle multiple languages at once, to manuscripts that have survived fires, wars, and centuries of scrutiny without giving up their secrets, these are documents that resist explanation.

Why were they written? Who were they meant for? And what does it say about us that, hundreds of years later, we are still obsessed with unlocking their meaning?

This is a story about knowledge lost, secrecy, obsession, and the unsettling possibility that some messages were never meant to be understood at all.

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For books written and published by Keith Hocton

www.entrepotpublishing.com