Strangers and Intimates - by Tiffany Jenkins (Hardcover)

About the Book

A unique and brilliantly readable history of the rise and fall of private life in the West.

Book Synopsis

The fascinating story of how private life was won, and how it might just as easily be lost . . .

Private life is in mortal danger, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked. It is threatened by a three-headed monster: state and corporate surveillance, a confessional, 'tell-all' culture that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy, and the intense politicization of private life.

Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent - and hard-won - achievement. It also warns that, if we're not careful, it will be a temporary one.

Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human confrontations: from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke's rallying cry that 'an Englishman's home is his castle'; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and from the embrace by the public of reality TV to the Chinese government's social credit system.

A private life is a precious, sustaining resource that is of profound intrinsic value, and it must be defended. We won't know what we have lost until it has gone . . .

About the Author

Dr Tiffany Jenkins is an Anglo-American writer, academic and broadcaster. She is the author of the acclaimed Keeping Their Marbles: How Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There. She is an honorary fellow in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, and a former visiting fellow in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics. Tiffany appears regularly on BBC Radio 4, including Saturday Review and Front Row. She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series 'A History of Secrecy' and 'Contracts of Silence', about the rise of non-disclosure agreements. She is a frequent commentator for The Guardian, The Observer, the Financial Times, The Scotsman (for which she was a weekly columnist) and The Spectator. She divides her time between London and Sussex.