Robert Thomson was born in Vancouver in 1940. He took his honors B.A. (first class) at the University of British Columbia (1962) then completed a PhD in Romance Studies at Yale University. He has been an opera enthusiast from the age of twelve and has written two books on Operatic Italian: ’Italian for the Opera’ (150 pp.) in 1992 then the much larger ’Operatic Italian’ (460 pp.) in 2009. He has just finished (2015) a book on Spanish: ’Love songs in Spanish for Enjoyment and Learning’. See his site for further info.: www.godwinbooks.com