Strangers and Intimates The Rise and Fall of Private Life

<p><b>The fascinating story of how private life was won, and how it might just as easily be lost . . .</b><br><br>Private life is in mortal danger, following decades in which it has been relinquished and ransacked. It is threatened by a three-headed monster: state and corporate surveillance, a confessional, &rsquo;tell-all&rsquo; culture that makes people complicit in the invasion of their own privacy, and the intense politicization of private life.<br><br>Tiffany Jenkins&rsquo;s groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent &ndash; and hard-won &ndash; achievement. It also warns that, if we&rsquo;re not careful, it will be a temporary one.<br><br><i>Strangers and Intimates </i>is animated by dramatic human confrontations: from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke&rsquo;s rallying cry that &lsquo;an Englishman&rsquo;s home is his castle&rsquo;; 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&rsquo;s social credit system.<br><br>A private life is a precious, sustaining resource that is of profound intrinsic value, and it must be defended. We won&rsquo;t know what we have lost until it has gone . . .</p>