He is remembered for his translations from Bengali into English and his association with Rabindranath Tagore, on whom he wrote two books including a critical biography.
Thompson was educated at the Kingswood School and later worked at a bank in Bethnal Green to support his mother and siblings.
He joined Richmond Theological College, was ordained a Methodist minister and gained a degree from the University of London.
During the First World War he served with the 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment as an army chaplain in Mesopotamia from 1916 to 1918, and his services to the wounded earned him a Military Cross.
In his own words, he was "a liberal conservative with a touch of socialism"[9] and he often took views opposed to the official British line in India.
[9] His close friendships and the fact that he himself remained apolitical made him what Natwar Singh terms "a well meaning but not very successful Anglo-India goodwill ambassador [who] was listened to but did not have enough clout to influence policy in London or in New Delhi".
He made three trips to India in the 1930s funded by the Rhodes Foundation to look at 'intellectual co-operation' between writers, to research his biography of Lord Metcalfe and for the purpose of gauging the Congress's reaction to the Viceroy's unilateral declaration of war.
His other Indian novels are Night falls on Siva's hill (1929), A Farewell to India (1931), So a Poor Ghost (1933) and An End of the Hours (1938).
The scholar Harish Trivedi has noted that "[Thompson] deserves to be revived as the fourth of the top quartet of Raj novelists, next in interest only to Kipling, Forster and Paul Scott".
[6][14] In 1919, Thompson married Theodosia, daughter of the American missionary William Jessup in Jerusalem, having met her while posted there the previous year.
The couple had two sons, Frank, the elder, who died in Bulgaria during the Second World War, and the second, Edward Palmer Thompson, the noted historian.