The most recent of his four books is Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis (2013), which was described by Adam Thirlwell, in a lead review in the Times Literary Supplement, as "a great biography of the work as much as the life".
Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 (2008)[2] is the first comprehensive narrative history in English of the part played by Italy in World War I.
[4] A Paper House (1992) is a political travelogue which describes the federal republic of Yugoslavia upon the brink of dissolution.
Thompson has also edited, with Louis Mackay, Something in the Wind: Politics after Chernobyl (1988), and has translated fiction from French, Italian and Croatian.
In 2015, Thompson took up a position as Reader in Modern History at the University of East Anglia (half time).