Strangers and Intimates

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 . . .

Auteur
Dr Tiffany Jenkins is a writer, cultural historian 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’s a former 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. She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series ‘A History of Secrecy’ and ‘Contracts of Silence', about the rise of non-disclosure agreements, and has appeared regularly as a critic on Saturday Review and Front Row. Her opinion pieces have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, the Financial Times, the Scotsman and The Spectator. She divides her time between London and Sussex. Strangers and Intimates is her third book.

Texte du rabat

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

Résumé

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.