Peter Moore is a writer, journalist and lecturer. He teaches creative writing at the University of Oxford. His debut, Damn His Blood, reconstructed a rural murder in 1806. His second, The Weather Experiment, a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year', traced early efforts to forecast the weather. His latest book, Endeavour, was a multiple book of the year and a Sunday Times bestseller. He presents a history podcast called Travels Through Time.
[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
*The Times*
[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
*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
*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
*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)*
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