His five published books deal with subjects such as the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988), Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and moral panics regarding child sexual abuse in Britain.

Webster, the son of a subpostmaster, was born in 1950, in Newington, Kent, and raised in a strict Methodist family; according to journalist Bob Woffinden, "His parents' work ethic meant he had much time to himself, leading to independence of thought and intellectual rebellion."

[4] Webster once wrote, "at the heart of almost everything I have written over the last twenty years or so is the view that, in our modern, proudly rationalist attempts to break the links which tie us to our superstitious, essentially religious past, we have become profoundly muddled about our own cultural history."

[7] With Bob Woffinden, Webster helped find lawyers for Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, former Newcastle nurses who were falsely accused of sexually abusing children in their care.

[8] Webster explained his interest in the problem of false allegations in his The Secret of Bryn Estyn (2005): ... when I was an undergraduate reading English literature at the University of East Anglia, I stumbled upon a book by the historian Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium ...

All three books seek to establish the role played in history by collective fantasies and all three are concerned with "the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil." ...

The Paladin paperback edition of Europe's Inner Demons, which appeared in 1976, bore on its cover these words of Anthony Storr: "This is a book of real stature which I hope will have wide impact.

It was founded in 1988 by Webster and was primarily involved in publishing images of the Suffolk Heritage Coast, painted by Stanley Spencer, Philip Wilson Steer and J M W Turner.

[12] Webster noted that he named the book after the fourth section of The Crime of Blasphemy, a pamphlet issued by the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie and his Publishers, and that his work is influenced by historians Karen Armstrong and Norman Cohn.

He described his book as "an attempt to show, without ever aspiring to completeness or comprehensiveness, that the picture of blasphemy which is presented by the authors of International Committee's document is incomplete, and in some respects, seriously misleading.

Christian Wolmar writes that in Webster's view "there is a grave risk of injustice against care workers because there are financial incentives" to make false claims and police have encouraged alleged victims to come forward by suggesting that they may obtain damages.

[19] Chris Beckett writes that while Webster accepts that abuse occurs, he considers many convictions against former residential workers were miscarriages of justice and sees them as similar to witch-hunts.

The work, in which Webster argued that abuse scandals could be phenomena created by public hysteria,[1] received praise from British journalists.

Peter Wilby calls The Secret of Bryn Estyn "exhaustively researched", noting that while it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, it went largely unnoticed by the British press.

[22] Journalist Catherine Bennett credits Webster with exposing "the hysteria and false accusations generated by the Bryn Estyn children's home investigations", and writes that in his view the uncritical press reports about the issue demonstrate "the insatiable human appetite for narratives of evil".

Garnett planned a three-hour drama based on The Secret of Bryn Estyn for Britain's Channel 4, but the project was cancelled due to budget cuts.

"[24] "Structuralism and dry rot", Webster's article,[25] was cited by Geoffrey Hartman as an example of how literary theory has become the focus of public debate in England.