It is sometimes suggested that privacy is a modern preoccupation, a response to new technology, and that a person who values it is reacting to the anxieties of the present moment. The suggestion is not quite right. Privacy is one of the older marks of a well-ordered life, and it has never really gone out of fashion.

People of standing have always kept a measured distance between their public dealings and their private affairs. They have always understood that not everything need be visible, that a degree of reserve is a courtesy as much as a protection, and that a life conducted entirely in the open is not a richer life but a more exposed one. This is not new thinking. It is rather old thinking, and sound.

What is new is only the difficulty. The distance that discretion requires was, for most of history, supplied by circumstance. Information moved slowly, records stayed where they were kept, and a person had to do very little to remain reasonably private. That is no longer the case. The value has not changed. The effort required to honour it has.

So a person who attends to their privacy today is not being anxious, or modern. They are doing something quite traditional, which is declining to let the accident of the present moment decide how visible their life should be.

The considered life has always included a private one. It still does. The only thing that has changed is that the private part, which once looked after itself, now has to be looked after deliberately.

The instinct behind it is as old as good manners, and just as worth keeping.