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 was such an interesting read to delve deeper into the idea of privacy and how it has changed within the 21st century.

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.

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.