Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life

by Tiffany Jenkins

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 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 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 . . .

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Society, Audiobook, Science, Politics, History and Politics

463 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2025

Reviews

[Anna]

Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life is a very ambitious book, covering the history of privacy across 500 years of history across Europe and the US. It's a really interesting topic, on which I've no doubt there has been extensive scholarship. This book doesn't go into that academic work as much as I'd hoped it would. While Jenkins makes some good points, the overall argument is inevitably partial and anecdotal due to its extremely wide scope. I understand wanting to make the subject accessible, however my personal preference is for the inclusion of more references and population-level statistics. Moreover, the final chapters shift from a more distanced writing style to making political points about what is wrong with the current balance of private and public in the UK. These might have been stronger if developed in greater depth in a separate book, rather than treated as a continuation of the historical narrative.

I think Strangers and Intimates is at its best when explaining ways in which the boundaries of public and private life have shifted, hardened, and softened over the centuries:

In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson defined secrecy and privacy as interchangeable. Privacy, Johnson described as the 'state of being hidden: secrecy'. Secrecy was 'privacy; the state of being hidden'. But by the nineteenth century, these terms had come apart and their meanings had evolved. In 1814, the dictionary definition of privacy was recognisably modern: 'the state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right'. By contrast, secrecy, according to Bentham's Of Publicity (1843), is 'an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to to be the system of a regular government'. While secrecy had taken on negative connotations, privacy was aligned with positive ones. Privacy, as the German sociologist Georg Simmel observed, had become akin to 'spiritual private property'.

I like that paragraph, but wish the 1814 dictionary had a reference as the other quotes do. I also appreciated the link that Jenkins makes between the occupation of American right wing politics by evangelical Christianity. That is not a phenomenon I would have thought to connect with changing notions of privacy, yet I follow her point:

As people became ever more open in public about their private selves, they were also being held to more demanding political standards by the guardians of progressive thinking. In other words, just as the public was experimenting with greater openness about private life, the private domain itself was being politicised. The private sphere was left unprotected, and separated from privacy, while the self was projected further and further outwards. In turn, the right began to focus its political energy on realising the best version of the private domain, and questions of faith and private [family] matters were pushed into the public realm. By the end of the 1970s, the separation between public and private that had been forged in the eighteenth century had dissolved.

I think that last statement is a bit too sweeping and was not convinced by the discussion of privacy in the social media era, which seemed simplistic. I found it odd that a whole chapter titled 'Lets talk about sex' examined consent policies at US colleges (not something I'd heard of before), but did not mention MeToo and the revelations therein. There is an interesting thesis here, which I think needs more development:

Amid the death throes of private and public life, contemporary public debate and policy concentrate on partial, technical, and superficial solutions rather than addressing the root issues. But if the notion of a protected private life, separate from the public sphere, has been largely abandoned - if privacy is now more about agreeing to terms of service rather than the right to be left alone - why should anyone care? When the very idea of private life loses meaning, it's not surprising that many people are indifferent about protecting it.

While concerns about data privacy are justified - corporations and governments do infringe on people's privacy, and digital tools can indeed be used to exert control over individuals - the nature of the discussion around these issues is often misguided. The core issue facing the West is not merely technological but lies in the blurred boundaries between corporate power, state authority, and the rights of citizens. To address privacy violations, we need to go beyond talking about technology and instead focus on the relationship between power and the individual. Much of the current anxiety around digital surveillance focuses too heavily on platforms and apps, without adequately addressing the actions of the authorities themselves.

The starting point there seems like an over-generalisation, as I'm not sure that the notion of private life has been wholly abandoned. The subsequent point about power carries an implicit critique of capitalism, as a small number of giant tech companies collect unimaginable amounts of data about supposedly 'private' behaviour in order to monetise it. A subsequent paragraph states that a clear boundary between the public and private domains 'must be erected and defended not only online but also in the offline world.' I think that deserved a lot of unpacking: how should that boundary be chosen? Who decides where it falls? How can be established? Does defending it require changes in the law, in policy, in education, in cultural norms? etc.

Strangers and Intimates ends with commentary on politics, which is likewise thought-provoking but deserves greater exploration and supporting evidence:

The political and the non-political have merged. Today, engaging in politics often requires revealing personal aspects of life, which is intrusive and compromising. Private matters, especially intimate ones, are increasingly exposed to political pressures. However, not all personal matters are political, not should they be bound by such constraints. Similarly, politics need not be so personal; it benefits from broader perspectives that look beyond individual concerns and focus on the bigger picture. Without the divide between the two realms, the public arena of contestation is much reduced. It is not political enough.

I think Strangers and Intimates deserves to be at least two books, one historical and one examining current politics and society. As it stands, the writing is engaging yet the scope so wide as to be impossible to do justice to in 400 pages. While it raises excellent questions (and informed me that President Nixon beat his wife), I found myself wishing for more depth and more theory. For further reading on technology and privacy, I recommend The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, and The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy.

[Debumere]

A deep thinking book about privacy from earlier centuries to today and how changing societies have changed the perception of what ‘privacy’ means.

This book was very well researched and very detailed, and whilst I enjoyed the later years I found the earlier centuries a bit long but if this kind of detailed research is your thing then you’re going to love it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so intricate and for that I was quite impressed

Many thanks to NetGalley and Picador for this ARC.

[susanprosa]

Audible - will come back for a review :)

[Helen]

One of the best non fiction books I have read for ages. An excellent account of the rise and fall of private life and an excellent analysis of how and why both private and public life are so diminished in modern times, and why we all suffer as a result. All written in a compelling and entertaining style that makes the book a real page turner. I highly recommend this book.

[Mbogo J]

Right of the blocks I should say I appreciated a lot the amount of research that went into this. We started way, way back browsing through records of an unhallowed time when neighbors could peep into your house and testify that you were doing something untoward to the enlightened years where you had the right to privacy where the problem now was how to grapple with people who voluntarily gave up their privacy to tell us everything on social media. It was an amazing ride, it also helps that I do not particularly have very strong views towards privacy, I consider it and its cousin safety the two elements of Heisenberg uncertainty of a different kind:too much privacy and safety suffers, this is where terror cells grow and society's vermin gets free reign, too little privacy and we are in a police state which is safe but our humanity is dead, as usual the answer lies somewhere in the middle, where exactly is an endless discussion.

Other readers had stronger views on this subject and have written long passionate treatises on their point of view. Maybe an interested reader should check other reviews to get the gist of the book, I just wanted to say I enjoyed reading this, many thanks to Tiffany Jenkins for taking time to write this and I highly recommend it.

[Oleksandr Zholud]

This is a non-fiction book about the concept of privacy and how it has changed over the years. According to the author, we have today moved back to ‘no private life’ that was common in the Middle Ages, but with new technologies.

It turns out that initially, private as an opposition to public had a negative meaning, which still remains in the word ‘deprived’, for it signified exclusion from the public sphere. Public life, limited to free adult male citizens, unfolded in the polis while the animalistic aspects were relegated to the oikos. Everything essential to life’s maintenance and reproduction – work, economics, sex, eating, cooking, birth, death – was hidden from public view (i.e. private). And because the oikos served the public realm of the citizens, who had status and property, while the private was for women and slaves.

In the Middle Ages (the main sources of this book is not even Europe in general but England) it was considered proper to spy on one's own neighbors, whether they commit infidelity or other sins in their homes, so no ‘castle defense’ in the age of castles!

Privacy comes with reformation, but as an undesired byproduct – to have social peace: The religious turmoil of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries illustrated the political and social challenges of having the English monarch as the leader of the national church. Catholic, Anglican and Puritan alike had begun to follow their own conscience in secret over the best path to salvation.

Fast forward to our near past. The case of Monica Lewinsky. I was quite young back then and haven’t followed the trial closely, even assuming that it was Monica who accused Clinton. It wasn’t so, her ‘friend’ taped (w/o permission of course) her private phone calls, which were the basis of the trial. Compare this with what it was just a few decades ago. In the 1960s, the media knew about the multiple extramarital affairs of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but did not report on them because they were not, at the time, considered newsworthy. When the journalist Johnny Apple was assigned to cover JFK’s visit to New York in 1963, he saw a beautiful woman being escorted to Kennedy’s suite. Excited that he might have a story, he dashed back to the New York Times office and told Sheldon Binn, chief assignment editor of the Metro desk. Binn brushed him aside. ‘Apple,’ he said, ‘you’re supposed to report on political and diplomatic policies, not girlfriends. No story.’

In our times, when the majority of Earth's population is around tech that monitors them 24/7 – from CCTV to our phones, PCs and tablets, the protection of privacy is both important and impossible.

[Jung]

Privacy may seem like an obvious human need, something universal and timeless, but Tiffany Jenkins argues in "Strangers and Intimates" that it is nothing of the sort. Rather, privacy is a social and historical invention - something that has changed dramatically over time. What we now regard as natural boundaries between public and private life would have been unrecognizable to people in earlier centuries. Understanding how these ideas evolved gives us a clearer sense of why we struggle with privacy today, especially in a digital world where the lines between intimate and public life are blurrier than ever.

Take the case of Harry and Meghan stepping away from royal duties in 2020, citing a desire for privacy. Many accused them of hypocrisy when they later gave interviews and released a memoir. Yet their story is not inconsistent - it reflects the complexity of modern privacy, where we seek control over what we reveal rather than absolute secrecy. This illustrates a key theme: privacy has never been a fixed concept. In ancient Athens, for instance, life was structured around two realms - the polis, or public sphere of citizenship, and the oikos, the household. Privacy, in the sense we know it, did not exist. Similarly, in medieval Europe, privacy was often viewed with suspicion. Secrecy suggested subversion or sin, and the idea of withdrawing into an inner life separate from the community was practically alien.

Things began to change in the early modern period, and Martin Luther played a decisive role. In 1521, Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and refused to recant his writings, declaring that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. In an age when faith was collective and mediated through priests, this was revolutionary. Luther’s insistence on the authority of individual conscience carved out a new kind of private space within the self - a personal interiority beyond external control. This emphasis on inwardness helped lay the foundation for modern notions of privacy, where the individual’s inner life becomes something sacred and protected.

By the eighteenth century, European society was experiencing another transformation. Public life was booming, with coffeehouses, pleasure gardens, and scientific societies becoming vibrant centers of discussion and exchange. To participate in public life was to matter, but alongside this explosion of sociability came a new valuation of private life. The household increasingly became a sanctuary from the bustle of the city. Architectural changes reflected this shift, as homes incorporated separate spaces for servants, ensuring that family members could enjoy greater solitude. Legal frameworks also strengthened the concept of private property and reinforced the separation of public and domestic spheres. However, these privileges were not universally accessible. The ideal of a private, protected home largely belonged to the middle and upper classes, while women, though central to domestic life, were often excluded from the public sphere entirely.

Even as privacy gained value, it was far from secure. In the seventeenth century, private gatherings could be seen as dangerous, and French law banned meetings of more than four people without permission. Secrecy equaled sedition. Yet by the nineteenth century, attitudes had shifted dramatically. The 'Mazzini Affair' of 1844 offers a striking example. Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian revolutionary exiled in London, discovered that his mail was being intercepted by British authorities at the request of Austria. The revelation caused public outrage, with figures like Charles Dickens mocking the government for violating private correspondence. This scandal revealed how expectations had changed: letters, now delivered to private homes through an increasingly efficient postal system, were considered inviolate. Privacy no longer implied dangerous concealment; it suggested dignity and personal liberty.

Nowhere was this new ideal more pronounced than in Victorian domestic culture. The home was celebrated as a sacred refuge from the harsh industrial world, a place of warmth and morality. But this idealization of domestic privacy could also be restrictive, particularly for women. While men engaged in the expanding public sphere, women were consigned to the home under the 'cult of domesticity.' Yet even within this framework, privacy was highly prized - so much so that when private family sketches of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert leaked in 1847, the royal couple moved swiftly to suppress them. For the Victorians, the home represented not just physical seclusion but moral purity, a sharp boundary between intimate life and public scrutiny.

This conception persisted well into the twentieth century but began to fracture with the rise of feminism and other social movements. Virginia Woolf famously argued in 1929 that 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,' reframing privacy as a tool for liberation rather than confinement. Where Victorian privacy had protected families, Woolf’s vision sought to protect individuals - particularly women - from the obligations that limited their autonomy.

The 1960s and 1970s marked another seismic shift. Feminists declared that 'the personal is political,' challenging the notion that private life was separate from public concerns. Consciousness-raising groups and speak-outs on issues like abortion transformed intimate experiences into political evidence, demanding systemic change. Private suffering became a legitimate basis for collective action. This politicization of the personal expanded scrutiny into previously private realms - sexuality, family roles, even personal habits - blurring boundaries in ways that still shape contemporary culture.

Fast forward to today, and privacy faces its greatest challenge yet. The digital revolution has dismantled the old barriers between public and private life. Social media encourages us to curate and broadcast intimate details for an invisible audience, while surveillance technologies quietly harvest our data. Reality television and platforms like Instagram normalize self-exposure, making what was once private into a commodity. Ironically, the tech pioneers who once promised tools of liberation have created systems of pervasive monitoring that rival any state apparatus. We carry tracking devices in our pockets, install listening devices in our homes, and voluntarily document our lives online. The Victorian ideal of privacy as a sanctuary now seems quaint in an age where visibility often feels synonymous with existence.

This raises profound questions. Is privacy still possible - or even desirable - in a world where connection and exposure are forms of currency? Does the erosion of privacy undermine individuality, creativity, or democracy itself? After centuries of treating privacy as essential to dignity and freedom, we now live in a culture that trades it away, sometimes eagerly, for convenience or social validation.

The history traced in "Strangers and Intimates" shows that privacy has never been static. It has meant different things in different eras: secrecy, conscience, domestic sanctuary, political weapon, and now, perhaps, a luxury or even an illusion. What remains constant is its deep connection to power - who gets to withdraw, who gets to reveal, and who controls the terms of that exchange. As we navigate a digital age of radical transparency and constant surveillance, the challenge is not merely to reclaim privacy but to decide what kind of society we want when privacy can no longer be taken for granted.

[Stella Caldwell]

Very conflicted about this book. There were some interesting points, but I think it struggles in focus and I didn't personally agree with the author's thesis.
I knew this was published in the UK, and assumed it would be concentrated there but that wasn't entirely correct. I liked the beginning where she traced the development of the idea of privacy in the Tudor era and British politics. But later, the book had a somewhat distracting ping-pong in between UK cultural context and American cultural anecdotes, but never touched on any other geographical areas. The inclusion of American development of the idea of privacy seemed arbitrary. Some of the anecdotes would just be touched on, while others would be examined especially in depth but didn't feel any more meaningful. As an example, there was an interesting comment by a journalist about JFK's personal life (I think) that was barely mentioned, while there was a lengthy discussion of the Clinton/Lewinsky saga; both of which overall contributed to generally feeling a lack of nuance. I had issues with the sex/consent chapter as well, and her criticism of Title IX policies in the US. I think this could have been strengthened with a tighter focus, either in time span, geographically, or thematically.

[kevin]

The story of how privacy arose and broken down is an interesting one. There are aspects of privacy we take for granted may not necessarily be a given during medieval times. And how these defined separation were slowly broken over time with how we chose to publicize private lives, such as Clinton - Lewinsky incident. At times, especially, at the beginning, it is not quite clear how things relates to privacy but pieces do build up over the chapters.

[Aoife Moss]

This took me so long but was very interesting

[Andrew Norton]

This well-written book explains how the idea of a private life developed and then, in recent decades, began to decline. Politically, the idea of a private realm with minimal public interference is most associated with liberalism, but author Tiffany Jenkins empahsises its many sources. Strangers and Intimates blends political, intellectual, cultural and economic history.

Jenkins stresses the relationship between public and private; each depends on the other. Our contemporary idea of the 'public' works by excluding some matters. In political and professional contexts we restrict personal loyalties and beliefs and anything that should be done in 'private' time.

Medieval Europe lacked a clear distinction between public and private. People were usually visible to each other, which Jenkins suggests was reassuring; it made them safer and less likely to do something wrong. Even in palaces the idea of a corridor that secluded rooms was not yet current. The Catholic Church shaped daily existence. Political power was often personal; monarchical rule keeps power within the family.

As in other histories of the ideas that led to liberalism, Jenkins discusses the rise of Protestantism. Martin Luther was no liberal. But Jenkins argues that Luther 'set in motion a series of conflicts over authority ... which, after many twists and turns, gradually fostered a nascent sense of of the individual conscience. This would eventually become the cornerstone of privae life.'

The splitting of the Christian church after the reformation meant that more people had a 'private' religious faith and life that differed from what they were expected to show in public. In England, by the late 1550s and early 1560s, 'liberty of conscience' became a claim by those wanting to practice their Catholic faith in a country ruled by a Protestant.

John Locke's Letter on Toleration, published in 1689, drew on the idea of conscience to argue that people could not be coerced into correct religious belief. Political interference in religous belief should therefore be resisted.

By the 1630s most men in London were literate, able to read things for themselves without intermediaries. The first daily newspapers begain in the early 1700s. Coffee houses were public places where men exchanged ideas. Books could be rented 'by the candle', reading time lasting until the candle burned out. By the 1730s England had the idea of 'publick opinion'.

The rise of an industrial society, slowly displacing a more agrarian economy, also changed the dynamics of public and private. As more people began working outside the home, it started a long process of 'home' and 'work' acquiring distinct purposes and rules.

Norms and laws on sex also changed. In the 1600s there were strict religious rules on sex before marriage and adultery, but the last adultery prosecution occurred in 1746. By 1800 a quarter of children were born out of wedlock and many brides were already pregnant. More people believed that they could act on their 'private' desires without following public rules.

Public life also changed. 'Strangers' were encountered much more frequently, which in turned necessitated new rules of interaction - what became known as 'politeness'.

John Stuart Mill, the 19th century liberal most read by later generations, gets a chapter. He's a case study in how, to use a later phrase, the personal becomes the political. Reaction to his semi-scandalous affair with a married woman, Harriet Taylor, informed his defence of private life against the tyranny of social custom. Mill was an early supporter of feminist causes.

Much of feminism was about women claiming their place in the public realm. But feminists also argued for changes in the private realm, to how children were raised and socialised and how men and women interacted. By the 1970s some saw the family as a source of oppression, rather than a private space protected from outside scrutiny and interference.

This was an era when the public and private realms began collapsing into each other. People began talking about private and intimate matters much more than they had previously; it became harder for public figures to protect their private lifes from intrusion and reporting.

Not coincidentally, reality TV began in the 1970s, with ordinary families letting their lives be broadcast to anyone who wanted to watch. With the rise of personal computers and smartphones, by the early 21st century people were streaming to strangers videos of activities that would not even have been discussed in public 60 years earlier.

Despite this, as Jenkins notices, regulation of sexual activity is increasing. In the 1990s the first US colleges to introduce rules on 'affirmative consent', checking for consent at each stage of sexual activity, was widely criticised and mocked. Sex, especially at at this age, was seen as too messy and experimental to be subject to an official process and checklist. Now affirmative consent is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions.

The rise of social media further blurred the difference between public and private. While most people stop short well short of OnlyFans-style exposure, they reveal more of their daily lives to the public than at any time since the original separation of the public and private realms. People who don't overshare on Instagram or Facebook still have their every web search and site visit monitored and the information sold. Stupid or offensive comments that would once have been forgotten or forgiven by the small number of people who heard them are screenshotted for later reputational destruction. It's a life of constant surveillance, for now not as comprehensively malevolent as the trust-destroying spying on family, friends and colleagues of the communist states, but almost as pervasive.

Jenkins laments the breakdown of the public and private realms. To quote from her last chapter:
'It is essential to have a private space shielded from coportate, state and public scrutiny - a place where we can be alone. This solitude enables us to develop an inner life and a sense of self without constant external pressures. Originality begins in private, shaded from the conformity of social pressures, long before it is made public. Permanent visibility can hinder our ability to think, reflect and concentrate. The ongoing externalisation of the self threatens our capacity for introspection and contemplation.'
'The private sphere is where we make personal commitments It's where we have the freedom to discriminate; to be with whom we wish to be with, say what we want to say.'

I can only agree.

[b bb bbbb bbbbbbbb]

As long as the author didn’t stray into territory where I had some familiarity it was a decent read. Plenty of interesting historical details and reflection. Many provocative reflections on what privacy is, how it's delineated, and how it fits within the social contexts and norms of a given time and place in (Western) history.

As it approached the modern world the arguments became flimsier. Odd takes, non-sequitors and over-generalzations extrapolated from small examples, straw-man arguments and so on. The adage about realizing the limits of a commentator as soon as they enter into areas where you have some experience applies here.

The scope of this book is broad and the author appears somewhat under-informed and researched for the modern area.. It suffers as a result of that, and lack of focus when it reaches modern times and fails to built an accurate overarching narrative.

Some various notes:

The author seems, at times, selectively oblivious to the extensive range of grass-roots social movements from the 60's to at least the 2000's which are sometimes, but certainly not always, mediated by technology.

> But if the notion of a protected private life, separate from the public sphere, has been largely abandoned - if privacy is now more about agreeing to terms of service rather than the right to be left alone - why should anyone care? When the very idea of private life loses meaning, it's not surprising that many people are indifferent about protecting...

A protected private life has not been abandoned wholesale and it is certainly about more than just mindless Terms of Service clickery. There is variation across generations, social groups and between all individuals, however there are strong privacy oriented currents through parts of the populace and there have been national scale expressions of concern when expectations of privacy are violated in significant ways en-masse.

> Another problem is the lack of faith in individual agency. Pro-privacy advocates often exaggerate the power of technology to manipulate...

Right after talking about blame getting shifted away from the state the author proceeds to try dumping more responsibility onto individuals despite significant collective action problems at play.

> When, in 2012, Democratic Party campaigners used online data to build up large potential audiences for political messaging in Barack Obama's presidential campaign, no one ... concerned about voter manipulation
> instead, politicos and commenters celebrated the use of Facebook and data to tailor messages to individuals on social media. When it brought results that they found agreeable, such tactics were lauded.

This is misconstruing online campaigns using permitted (and creepy) targeting as somehow equivalent to population scale unauthorized data harvesting and exfiltration.

> The reaction to Cambridge Analytica's actions is just one example in a long history of elite anxieties about the masses being influenced by technology.

And somehow the author manages to become an apologist for and minimizer of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

> had we been less interested in displaying our private lives and more interested in the world outside our own front doors, then the online world today would be very different

Weird condescending scolding of individuals as solely responsible for the privacy mess the world is in today.

> The encroachment of technology on privacy faced minimal resistance, bolstered by a belief in technology's transformative power amid political stagnation. As digital technology pervaded society, it ingrained itself into its frameworks during what was considered the 'end of history', a time when politics centered on technological governance rather than ideological ...

It did not face minimal resistance. Maybe at a legislative level, which often moves glacially slow compared to technology, but that is not the case at a social level where there has been extensive discussion and clashing on the topic of privacy. Even if just taken at a technological level such as the continual growing popularity of VPN and encrypted messaging services, as well as protocols, going back to the 2000's.

[Peter Ellehoj]

This is a thought-provoking contribution to the important and evolving issue about privacy, surveillance, and modern culture. I'm glad I read it, even where I ended up disappointed.

The central idea — that "private life" is not timeless but a relatively recent historical achievement — is genuinely interesting, and Jenkins expands on it with care in the book's opening historical sweep. This is the strongest section: patient, well-sourced, and quietly persuasive.

But that thesis — that the boundary between public and private is historically contingent and always shifting — gets somewhat diluted as the book goes on. The later chapters settle into a long run of anecdotes, drawn mostly from the US, Scotland, and England, that illustrate the point rather than build on it. The argument stops accumulating and starts repeating itself in different costumes.

Jenkins makes a set of normative claims: that private life deserves defending, that contemporary society has grown suspicious of it, and that constant self-disclosure is culturally unhealthy. Her challenge to a widespread assumption — that greater openness and disclosure are inherently democratic or emancipatory — is sharp, and it's one of the book's real strengths.

Her deeper claim, that privacy is itself a social institution enabling independent thought, moral development, intimacy, and genuine public participation, may be the book's most valuable contribution. It's worth reading for that argument alone.

Where the book falls short is follow-through. Thematic connections are often underdeveloped, and tangential examples dilute rather than sharpen the central argument. The perspective is also narrowly US/UK-centred — a real missed opportunity.

Opening the story in 16th-century Europe forecloses a lot; a look at how public and private life were negotiated in Asia or Africa would have tested and enriched the thesis rather than just restating it. As it stands, the later chapters feel less like an inquiry and more like a selection of stories chosen to fit Jenkins's conclusions.

Fittingly, in the final chapter Jenkins herself writes that "personal experience can of course be informative, but generalising it to a larger group requires moving beyond the individual perspective". That's precisely the problem with the book's own final, present-day section — it doesn't take its own advice.

Worth reading for the historical grounding and the philosophical case for privacy. Far less convincing as a unified argument about where we are now.

[Paul Dettmann]

Strangers and Intimates is an original and thought-provoking book. It traces the history of 'private life' as a concept from the sixteenth century through to the entangled web of today's privacy wars. I picked it up because I'm fascinated by online privacy, and how people set different boundaries to each other, and between each other. If you're ashamed of something, why do it at all? is a simplistic question but provides a good starting point for debate. When you start to dig far back in time to the earliest moments of modern society it turns out that the boundary between the public and private spheres has been changing back and forth. Change is the only constant in this context as with so many others. Tiffany Jenkins has written an important contribution that can help today's Gen Z and Gen A readers to understand their place in the world and better inform them about where to place their own boundaries. Because there are choices to be made, and on a 'precedent' basis: this situation I am comfortable with, this one makes me nervous, this one is right out. By evolving this approach from one day to the next, an individual gradually establishes their own boundary between their true self and their public self. Although of course, we really have many different version of ourselves, don't we? Strongly recommended.

[Gayle (OutsmartYourShelf)]

In earlier times, life was a lot more communal than it is today, & the concept of a private life didn't really exist in a balanced way. Ancient Athens had a strict divide between the public & private & women were firmly contained inside the home, whilst in the Tudor court of England even the monarch's every move was mostly carried out in front of others.

This is an examination of the concept of 'private life', those who helped shape it, & how it came into being from its initial start in the Reformation, through the 17th & 18th centuries & Sir Edward Coke (who was responsible for the saying 'An Englishman's home is his castle') through to supporters of women's rights including Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, & John Stuart Mill in the 19th century. Today the ownership of one's image & the 21st century has brought forth new questions about privacy & the public space.

This was both an interesting & thought-provoking read. I especially enjoyed the historical chapters but found myself a little less engrossed as we neared modern day. The argument that privacy was historically looked on as a way to hide things from others rather than being a retreat from the outside world was intriguing & it shows how much society has changed & mainly uncoupled from religious influence in England. Well-researched & well-written, I recommend this if you like challenging reads.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Pan Macmillan/Picador, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

[Rosa Daiger]

I listened to Strangers and Intimates as an audiobook. It was read by the author, who did a wonderful job with intonation and pace, which I certainly do not take for granted. Perhaps also because I heard rather than read this book, it took me practically until the end to understand its main (and rather simple) argument: that our understanding of, and norms surrounding, the boundary between the public and the private have shifted greatly over time and continue to do so.

The book feels like a very long series of anecdotes chosen to illustrate this point. The anecdotes are usually very interesting and well written, which is what kept me engaged. At the same time, the author seemed to argue for the high importance of privacy and that we must be wary of incursions by companies or governments. However, while she did discuss opposing views—particularly feminist ones—I ended up not fully convinced.

I do believe privacy is important, but I don’t feel the author sufficiently addressed feminist arguments that privacy has often been, and continues to be, a boon to perpetrators of violence, mostly against women and children. Still, I believe it is the mark of a good book to give you a lot of information, make an argument, and leave room for your own opinion. In that sense, it was a very worthwhile listen.

[Haxxunne]

Deep and fascinating
—
In the UK, which is not a police state by any means, on any given day you can expect to be captured on a camera 70 times, and that’s a low estimate. There is no secrecy any more: someone, somewhere, knows where you are. What about digital privacy? We all know that means nothing: our digital selves are either already being monetised by the techbros, or someone’s hacked email addresses to scam someone else at this very moment.

In this deep and fascinating book, Jenkins takes us on the journey from the non-private worlds of the sixteenth century to the privacy-busting 2020s, showing us that, although privacy is one result of the Early Modern Europeans and the schism of the Reformation (or even Reformations), it is not an idea that has come to the end of its usefulness. Our private selves and our public selves may not be exactly the same, but if there is no privacy, there is nowhere to test out hypotheses alone before foisting them on the world, where they will either stand up to scrutiny or crumble into nothingness. The line between the intensely personal and private and the untrammelled and uncontrolled pubic is a fine one, but it is one over which we should have ultimate say, rather than let it be driven by the market.

Four and a half stars

[Courtney]

Slowish start, but the author is thorough on purpose, tracing our Western understanding of the private vs public self/sphere since its modern inception in the Protestant revolution. The first 2/3rd of the book is pre-21st century, which meant the ramifications of digital technology felt cursory, but I suspect the author (I think rightfully) assumed any reader interested in this subject didn't need a rehash of our lived experience in the current state of privacy issues. Additionally, I found the UK-centric perspective interesting as I have most often read American-centric perspectives on this.

My only criticism is that tech companies, for the most part, evade her crosshairs. She positions them as protectors of data against the government's requests for private information, rather than as co-conspirators and swarmy profiteers exploiting and perpetuating technological determinism. "They outsourced their vision of progress to the machines," but she doesn't expound on those (from my current perspective) nefarious machinations.

[Andrew MacLeod]

An engrossing read for anyone wanting to better understand a hot-button theme. What jumps out at me is the intentional selection in this work: which historical events or legal precedents to discuss; which themes or intellectual side-roads to explore, and to what depth. I applaud the author's treatment of the choices she did make. The craftsmanship and wisdom are evident. One quibble: I think the importance of technological change (from the printing press to public-key cryptography to the ever-present iPhone cameras) is underexplored as a driver for the evolving cultural mores examined in the work.

On my wish list is a parallel exploration of financial privacy through the same historical, contextual, legal, and evolutionary lenses. From local economies revolving around coinage and paper bills, to offshore tax and asset havens and Swiss banking secrecy, to multinational corporations, modern KYC/AML/Sanctions regimes and 'third-party doctrine'.

[Marina Curran]

It is extremely engaging to have one topics as a lens through which to explore history. This book does a great job of reframing the issues of privacy from a purely modern phenomena to one that has long been part of public debate, sometimes openly and sometimes underwritten through action, law, and suppression.
mapping out both how the socio-historic and in our upbringing we can be moulded into certain beliefs. such is the case with Mill.
as well as, how viewing a movement through different lens and with different issues in mind can ouch you one way or another in arguements e.g the feminist differeces in views on privacy.
the fascinating case study of the SDS that took the merging of private and public to the extreme.

and how causes can be backed a variety of people with different motives, as when Hugh Hefner helped fund for organisations fighting for abortion rights.

a very interesting read. would recommend

[Popup-ch]

An interesting historical overview of privacy, with some strange lacunae.

It goes back a long way, and looks at how Greek and Roman life was split between the agora and the home, and spends an inordinate amount of time on the reformation, where various protestant sects had different views on the topic of what everyone got up to in their own privacy.

Of course there's a chapter about the early 21st century surveillance capitalism, with Facebook and Google vacuuming up all available information. But there's not much about how this information is fed into machine-learning algorithms, that may or may not pick up on it.

There is a lot about the understanding of privacy in UK and the US - but very little about the rest of the word. It would have been interesting to read about the Stalinist cheka, the East German Stasi or indeed the contemporary Chinese ubiquitous surveillance, but these topics are not treated at all.

[Samuel Nolley]

A detailed and nuanced history of attitudes and laws in privacy and publicity, and another reminder of how the enlightenment so profoundly and quickly transformed our lives.

I learned more than I expected. One nugget that will stick with me is how in the 20th century, people started to see privacy as a " right to" (sexuality, abortion) instead of just a "right from" (self incrimination , search and seizure).

It didn't change how I think about the world as much as Sapiens; Better Angels of Our Nature; or Guns, Germs and Steel; and it wasn't quite as fun as non fiction by Mary Roach or Michael Lewis, but it's very good for people who like this kind of thing.

It focused on Britain and the US. I would have enjoyed comparisons to other cultures. The end shifted from historical research to op-ed, which I didn't enjoy as much.

[Diane Jeske]

Jenkins attempts to offer a history of the development of the private sphere and of the ways in which that sphere is eroding. She begins with Reformation ideas of the interiority of the spiritual life and with ideas of religious toleration that made one’s beliefs a matter of private conviction. She shows how the undermining of the policing of sexual behavior created a private sphere, although the politicization of the personal by both conservatives and liberals has eroded the boundaries of that sphere. She also warns about the ways in our privacy is undermined by data mining and how reality TV has blurred the lines between public and private. An interesting read although it felt short on analysis to me.

[Brian Wilson]

I picked this because it was a notable 2025 book as selected by The Economist magazine. I read it mostly while on vacation. Lot of world historical perspectives on privacy - starting early on in Roman times, up through various periods when religion was at the center of privacy/freedom - Protestant reformation, Church of England, etc., then into more modern periods and the rise of feminism. Then into the Bill Clinton scandal, the scandal with Boris Johnson and using Whatsapp during Covid and finally into big tech and social media. Central theme is that there is not enough privacy in today's world. Interesting read generally though slower in the first half. Probably 3.5 stars.

[Jiří Janík]

Poměrně hezky uspořádaná přehlídka toho, jak se v průběhu historie a zejména v angloamerickém světě vyvíjel koncept svědomí, soukromé sféry, soukromého názoru a práva na jeho ochranu (či naopak legitimity jeho odhalení). Těžko polemizovat s dobře vyrešeršovanými a stravitelně podanými informacemi, jež kniha obsahuje, ale víc jsem si z ní neodnesl ze dvou důvodů. Jedním je historická a kulturní odlišnost středoevropského prostoru, jedním je ta, že finiš knihy je ve svých závěrech a predikcích poměrně plytký a neopírá se o skutečně soudobá sociologická data. Jako palivo k další diskuzi a rozšiřování obzorů v dané problematice je kniha ovšem adekvátní.

[Keen]

Not bad, but so focused on England (and later the US) that it's just... odd. Makes a passing reference to ancient Greece and then skips to the Tudor period and then jumps forward again. Which... given it's a history of an ostensibly universal human phenomenon... is a very specific choice. And while being very granular, a lot of the key insights are sourced secondhand and essentially bulk-paraphrased, which leads the reader to wonder if it might not be better to just read those other books.

[Amanda Bracken]

I made it through about three chapters of this book, because I really wanted to like it. However, I didn't want hours of history about English religious history and I'm not sure I but what the author was trying to set up. It was also so specific to England that I'm not sure how any conclusions drawn can be thought of as universal.

[Charles Anderson]

An interesting survey of the boundary between the private and public realms over the centuries, at least in Britain and the US. Rather too much information about Monica Lewinsky for my needs, and not enough discussion about the current state of privacy, although I suppose that might be to stop the book going out of date too quickly.

[Madalene]

Pretty surprised - I thought this would be a review of the societal swing in recent years of the defense of and rejection of privacy. It is not. It is a history told from the middle ages forward, focusing on in depth English history in particular and some American history on how privacy law has changed. Pretty dull IMO, even in audiobook form.

[Mark Noizumi]

3.8 stars. I found the examination of how private life came to be and how we've grown to shirk it in the age of the internet, very fascinating. I hadn't really considered all of the history. The book itself was a bit slow in parts but on the whole I found it worthwhile.