Strangers and Intimates : Rise and Fall of Private Life, The - Tiffany Jenkins

Strangers and Intimates

Rise and Fall of Private Life, The

By: Tiffany Jenkins

Hardcover | 15 January 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover


$50.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $12.75 with

 or 

Ships in 10 to 15 business days

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the boundary between public and private life has dissolved.

In her groundbreaking new book, Tiffany Jenkins reveals that this dismantling began long before the Internet and Big Tech made incursions into our private worlds. Describing the battles fought to achieve a private life in the West, Strangers and Intimates shows why, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked, it is now in mortal danger.

At its heart are dramatic and moving stories: from the emergence of private sanctuaries following the turbulence of the Reformation and the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, to the struggles of feminists who declared that ‘the personal is political’ and the ‘privacy paradox’ of Harry and Meghan, who bare all while demanding their privacy be respected.

With illustrations throughout, Strangers and Intimates shows that a private life, essential for the wellbeing of individuals and society, is threatened by a three-headed monster: state and corporate intrusion, a culture of authenticity that encourages the self-invasion of privacy, and a suspicion of its value as privacy becomes a key battleground in the 'culture wars’.

Private life is a recent, hard-won achievement. And if we’re not careful, Jenkins warns, it will also be a temporary one.

More in Social & Cultural History

Indigenous London : Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire - Coll Thrush
Jerusalem : The Biography   A History of the Middle East - Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Breath of the Gods : The History and Future of the Wind - Simon Winchester
Ask Not : The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed - Maureen Callahan
The Finest Hotel in Kabul : A People's History of Afghanistan - Lyse Doucet
Beyond the Meeting of the Waters : A Yorta Yorta Life Story - Wayne Atkinson
Unfinished Revolution : The feminist fightback - Virginia Haussegger

RRP $36.99

$31.75

14%
OFF
Graveyards : A History of Living with the Dead - Roger Luckhurst

RRP $65.99

$49.75

25%
OFF
Abandoned Women : Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas - Lucy Frost
Dark Emu : Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture - Bruce Pascoe
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe : 4th Edition - Brian P. Levack
Tell Me Why : Story of My Life and My Music - Archie Roach

RRP $34.99

$28.75

18%
OFF