Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

With flair and insight, Peter Moore takes one of the most famous and deceptively simple lines in history - a line that founded a nation and changed the world. He digs into it, to unearth a wealth of unexpected influences and connections, a trove of gripping stories, and a vibrant company of characters. A wonderfully absorbing and stimulating book

SARAH BAKEWELL, author of At The Existentialist Cafe

With deft insights and in clear prose, Moore restores the cosmopolitan origins of an American Revolution meant to liberate human potential. In this eloquent book, that revolution becomes more global and enduring and less parochial and limited

ALAN TAYLOR, Pulitzer Prize winning author of American Revolutions

The British empire of the eighteenth century blazed with the world-changing ideas and projects of thinkers and writers... Peter Moore captures this intellectual ferment in a fascinating narrative

ROBERT A. GROSS, author of The Minutemen and Their World

Deft, engaging and vivid, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness explores a vibrant, surprising and sometimes extraordinary period of history. Moore writes with such humanity and verve - I loved it

LUCY ATKINS, author of Magpie Lane

What a scintillating read. Atmospheric yet analytical, well-paced yet deeply probing, Moore's book delivers striking new perspectives with the stylistic grace of the Founding Fathers. I loved it

DAISY DUNN, author of Not Far From Brideshead

A timely reminder that the origins of the three big ideas in the American Dream lay mainly in Great Britain, with a lively account of the principal actors and episodes in the developing drama, and Benjamin Franklin in the starring role: a great read

LADY HALE

[A] thrilling and expansive narrative

MIKE JAY, author of Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is that rarest of things: an ambitious history of ideas that is also deeply intimate and humane. Peter Moore has an eye for the kind of sparking detail that drags you into the past by the shirt collar. A work of astonishing insight, pathos, and literary elegance

JOSEPH HONE, author of The Paper Chase

In bringing five participants vividly to life, Moore gives us a warmly human account of the birth of American democracy. How pleasing that deep scholarship can be so enjoyable and thought-awaking

MARTIN LATHAM, author of The Bookseller's Tale

Moore offers a rich and immersive intellectual history of the American Revolution... This is a pleasure

Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

In prose as fluid and engaging as Jefferson's own, Peter Moore reveals how cherished American ideals originated not from the end of one Founding Father's pen but through conversations across the Atlantic between men and women thinking and writing about how to make the world a better place

Kathleen DuVal, author of Independence Lost

Building on the pioneering work of Bernard Bailyn and John Brewer, Peter Moore offers a gripping account of the way in which British pamphlet wars of the 1760s fuelled American debates about independence. Mixing famous Founders with lesser known figures, especially Franklin's long-time friend the Tory printer and publisher William Strahan, Moore's book brings out the hidden roots of the Declaration of Independence

STELLA TILLYARD, author of The Great Level

Like Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men and Leo Damrosch's The Club, Moore's vibrant group biography brings to life the intellectual and political currents, in Britain and Colonial America, that gave rise to the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,"... An energetic and meticulously researched history

Kirkus (starred review)

The vivid descriptions of people, modes of communication, and social life are fascinating and give this well-researched history the readability of fiction

Booklist (starred review)

[An] engaging and thoroughly reader-friendly book... [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness] is about how a crazed, paranoid kind of political rhetoric was spread from the England of Wilkes to the America of Franklin and Paine, making rebellion possible. This part of the story is not just convincing but, to a modern reader, positively chilling

Noel Malcolm, Telegraph

[An] absorbing book... Moore has a keen eye for the sort of eloquent detail that enlivens biography, and he expertly evokes Franklin's transformation from proud artisan to member of a new American elite. He's particularly good on the quirkiness of Franklin's early adulthood . . . Moore [is] a crisp writer and adept at narrative sweep

Henry Hitchings, The Times

Rollicking... The book's compulsive readability is a tribute to Moore's skill at cracking open the pre-revolutionary period and reanimating the contingencies that eventually drove the settlers to embrace independence. Can be read as a refutation of originalism, or the contention that we should still live in a world governed by the putative beliefs of the Founding Fathers

Washington Post

History is best written by the losers. In Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Peter Moore... shows how Britain exported its highest ideals to the Americans who rejected it

Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal

Tracing this 'American Dream' through the writings of such English contemporaries as Samuel Johnson, Thomas Paine, the historian Catharine Macaulay, and the politician John Wilkes, Moore reminds us that the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence are by no means bounded to our shores

New Criterion

In his engaging narrative history Peter Moore argues that Jefferson's celebrated words provide the key to understanding... a vibrant, enlightened Anglo-American culture of the eighteenth century

T.H. Breen, TLS

Engrossing

Times Literary Supplement