His Life & Work in 1921 and Rabindranath Tagore, Poet and Dramatist in 1926, a critical biography of Tagore that led to bitter recrimination with him. Although Thompson argued that Tagore was underappreciated and misunderstood in the West, some of his criticisms of Tagore in the latter work led to much tension and misunderstanding between them.

Thompson was a keen observer of Indian politics and was sympathetic to the aspirations of the Indian nationalists. In his own words, he was "a liberal conservative