Strangers and Intimates

A brilliantly readable history of privacy with a simple and urgent argument: private life is a precious and sustaining resource that must be defended.

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A private life is a recent and hard-won achievement. But if we’re not careful, Strangers and Intimates warns, it will also be a temporary one.

In this groundbreaking history, Dr Tiffany Jenkins - academic, broadcaster and consultant on cultural policy - reveals that the dismantling of private life began long before the Internet and Big Tech. In Strangers and Intimates, she describes the fierce battles fought to achieve privacy in the West and shows how, following decades in which it has been relinquished, commercialised and ransacked, it is now in mortal danger.

At the heart of Strangers and Intimates are dramatic and moving stories: from the defence of personal conscience following the Reformation, to the national uproar in 1844 when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, and the feminist struggles declaring that ‘the personal is political’, to the modern-day ‘privacy paradox’ of Harry and Meghan, who reveal intimate details of their lives while demanding their privacy be respected.

Jenkins argues that private life is essential to individual and societal well-being and is now under siege from state and corporate surveillance, a culture of authenticity that encourages self-invasion, and a growing suspicion of privacy’s value, as it becomes a key battleground in the ‘culture wars’.

With illustrations throughout, this brilliantly readable work of original history demonstrates that a private life is a precious and sustaining resource that must be defended, before we realize, too late, what we’ve lost.