I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents: His father Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was a poet and admirer of the Nobel-prize winning poet Tagore. Thompson was one of the principal intellectuals of the Communist Party in Great Britain. Criticism
Leszek Kołakowski wrote a very harsh criticism of Thompson in his 1974 essay "My Correct Views on Everything" picking apart Thompson's left-wing views.

He also publiE. P. Thompsond influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. Thompson played a key role in the first New Left in Britain in the late 1950s.