Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

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)