Strangers & Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life

A brilliantly readable history of privacy which argues that a private life is a precious and sustaining resource that must be defended.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the boundary between public and private life has dissolved. In her groundbreaking new book, Tiffany Jenkins reveals that this dismantling began long before the Internet and Big Tech made incursions into our private worlds. Describing the battles fought to achieve a private life in the West, Strangers and Intimates shows why, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked, it is now in mortal danger.

At its heart are dramatic and moving stories: from the emergence of private sanctuaries following the turbulence of the Reformation and the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, to the struggles of feminists who declared that 'the personal is political' and the 'privacy paradox' of Harry and Meghan, who bare all while demanding their privacy be respected.

With illustrations throughout, Strangers and Intimates shows that a private life, essential for the wellbeing of individuals and society, is threatened by a three-headed monster: state and corporate intrusion, a culture of authenticity that encourages the self-invasion of privacy, and a suspicion of its value as privacy becomes a key battleground in the 'culture wars.'

Private life is a recent, hard-won achievement. And if we're not careful, Jenkins warns, it will also be a temporary one.