Tom Burns

Tom Burns (1906–95), publisher and journalist, was educated at Stonyhurst (where he was taught by Fr Martin D’Arcy) and worked with the publishers Sheed & Ward, 1926–35. From 1935 he worked for Longmans Green – where he arranged to finance Graham Greene’s mission to enquire into the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico – and he became a director of the Tablet Publishing Co., 1935–85. During WW2 he was press attaché to Sir Samuel Hoare, British Ambassador to Spain: see Jimmy Burns, Papa Spy: A True Story of Love, Wartime Espionage in Madrid, and the Treachery of the Cambridge Spies (2011). Chair of Burns & Oates, Catholic publishing house, 1948–67; editor of The Tablet, 1967–82.