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Strangers and Intimates
The Rise and Fall of Private Life
Brief Description
Brilliantly original . . . Endlessly fascinating - Alice Loxton, author of Eighteen An intricate cultural history . . . Thought-provoking - The Sunday Times Lucid and elegant - The Daily Telegraph From ancient times to our digital present, Strangers and Intimates traces the dramatic emergence...
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Strangers and Intimates
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A brilliantly original history of privacy with a simple and urgent argument: private life is a precious and sustaining resource that must be defended.
A brilliantly readable history of privacy which argues that a private life is a precious and sustaining resource that must be defended.
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Description
Brilliantly original . . . Endlessly fascinating - Alice Loxton, author of Eighteen
An intricate cultural history . . . Thought-provoking - The Sunday Times
Lucid and elegant - The Daily Telegraph
From ancient times to our digital present, Strangers and Intimates traces the dramatic emergence of private life, and argues that it is now in mortal danger.
In this sweeping history, acclaimed cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins takes readers on an epic journey, from the strict separations of public and private in ancient Athens to the moral rigidity of the Victorian home, and from the feminists of the 1970sβwho declared that 'the personal is political'βto the boundary-blurring demands of our digital age.
Strangers and Intimates is both a celebration of the private realm and a warning: as social media, surveillance and the expectations of constant openness reshape our lives, Jenkins asks a timely question: can private life survive the demands of the twenty-first century?
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781529034189
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 14 May 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 28.0mm
Width: 131.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 314g
Pages: 464
About the Author
Dr Tiffany Jenkins is a writer, cultural historian and broadcaster. She is the author of the acclaimed Keeping Their Marbles: How Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There. She's a former honorary fellow in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh and a former visiting fellow in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics. She wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series 'A History of Secrecy' and 'Contracts of Silence', about the rise of non-disclosure agreements, and has appeared regularly as a critic on Saturday Review and Front Row. She is a trustee of the British Museum. Her opinion pieces have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, the Financial Times, the Scotsman and The Spectator. She divides her time between London and Sussex. Strangers and Intimates is her third book.
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