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.