Strangers and Intimates

Tiffany Jenkins's groundbreaking new book describes the battles fought to achieve a private life in the West and 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, away from authority and public opinion, following the turbulence of the Reformation, to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when British spies opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; from the struggles of feminists of the early 1970s who declared that ‘the personal is political’; to Monica Lewinsky’s disastrous affair with Bill Clinton and the viewing public’s warm embrace of reality television.

Two decades into the twenty-first century and the boundary between our public life and private self has all but dissolved. Jenkins shows that contrary to popular belief, this dissolution began long before the arrival of the Internet. Big Tech did not single-handedly dismantle private life: the seeds of its destruction were sown long before.

Strangers and Intimates shows that a healthy private life, so essential for the individual and society, is today threatened by a three-headed monster: state and corporate intrusion; a confessional, ‘tell-all’ culture of authenticity that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy; and a pervasive suspicion of its value, as it becomes a key battleground in the so-called ‘culture wars’. It demonstrates vividly that private life is a very recent — and hard-won — achievement. And it warns that, if we’re not careful, it will also be a temporary one.