What do you think?
Rate this book
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life
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 . . .
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 . . .
463 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 15, 2025
30 people are currently reading
1036 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 28, 2025
Audible - will come back for a review :)
March 22, 2025
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.
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.
November 1, 2025
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.
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.
July 24, 2025
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.
Read
September 3, 2025Privacy 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.
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.
September 25, 2025
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.
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.
February 8, 2025
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.
May 19, 2025
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.
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.
July 14, 2025
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
—
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
September 30, 2025
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'.
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'.
October 4, 2025
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
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
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 17, 2025
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.
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.
May 27, 2025
A fascinating cultural history and examination of privacy in contemporary society.
November 25, 2025
excellent, a good explanation for why we've got our priorities inversed when it comes to privacy
November 27, 2025
“Strangers and Intimates” is a story about the “Rise and fall of private life”.
The author takes us on a high-level view of public and private life in the Western world starting with the ancient Greeks and leading up to the modern world. The book focusses mainly on the United Kingdom and the United States, and at times touches on other English speaking countries, including Canada.
What I liked about the book was its attempt to show how privacy evolved with cultural norms, and to an extent, laws and technology. It also presented private and public as being related,respectively, to inside the home and outside the home, as well as the rights to material and data. The word “Privacy” has indeed evolved over time but for the author this was more about Private life, than privacy itself.
That said the book was weak in a real analysis of the blurring between private and public lives. For example, it did not cover how media has evolved over time from a division of private (letters and personal telephone calls) and public media (radio, television) to where there was a merger of both private and public “content” with the launch of Facebook Newsfeed in 2006. I felt that a more thorough examination of media, such as done by Nicholas Carr in “Superbloom” could have helped her argument.
Mostly the book covered the differences of what is said in the home vs. in public and how in some countries like Scotland, what is said in the home can get you in serious trouble. This is indeed a problem as the State is in many places interfering with the rights to privacy and free speech - which has been fundamental to democracies. Little was also said about the privacy of data – which is a strongly related and serious problem in this digital age.
While the book covered many social issues, I felt it had an overly feminist viewpoint at the expense of an overall perspective of how privacy affects all people. The feminist viewpoint may be your preference, but this selective perspective should have been stated up front. (When bias is shown in a general discussion about humanity, focusing only on a subset of people, it raises the question about the objectiveness of the material presented. What else is biased vs. balanced?)
I also felt that the book could have covered Eastern and Middle Eastern views of Private Life to show how other societies do things? For example it would have been interesting to know more how Japan deals with public and public life and certainly how the Islamic world deals with it, and indeed how is this changing?
To sum this all up, I was quite neutral or indifferent about the book and found it hard to keep interested in it. In the end, I don’t recommend it.
The author takes us on a high-level view of public and private life in the Western world starting with the ancient Greeks and leading up to the modern world. The book focusses mainly on the United Kingdom and the United States, and at times touches on other English speaking countries, including Canada.
What I liked about the book was its attempt to show how privacy evolved with cultural norms, and to an extent, laws and technology. It also presented private and public as being related,respectively, to inside the home and outside the home, as well as the rights to material and data. The word “Privacy” has indeed evolved over time but for the author this was more about Private life, than privacy itself.
That said the book was weak in a real analysis of the blurring between private and public lives. For example, it did not cover how media has evolved over time from a division of private (letters and personal telephone calls) and public media (radio, television) to where there was a merger of both private and public “content” with the launch of Facebook Newsfeed in 2006. I felt that a more thorough examination of media, such as done by Nicholas Carr in “Superbloom” could have helped her argument.
Mostly the book covered the differences of what is said in the home vs. in public and how in some countries like Scotland, what is said in the home can get you in serious trouble. This is indeed a problem as the State is in many places interfering with the rights to privacy and free speech - which has been fundamental to democracies. Little was also said about the privacy of data – which is a strongly related and serious problem in this digital age.
While the book covered many social issues, I felt it had an overly feminist viewpoint at the expense of an overall perspective of how privacy affects all people. The feminist viewpoint may be your preference, but this selective perspective should have been stated up front. (When bias is shown in a general discussion about humanity, focusing only on a subset of people, it raises the question about the objectiveness of the material presented. What else is biased vs. balanced?)
I also felt that the book could have covered Eastern and Middle Eastern views of Private Life to show how other societies do things? For example it would have been interesting to know more how Japan deals with public and public life and certainly how the Islamic world deals with it, and indeed how is this changing?
To sum this all up, I was quite neutral or indifferent about the book and found it hard to keep interested in it. In the end, I don’t recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews