Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel Besterman was born in 1904 in Łódź, Poland, but he relocated to London during his youth.

During World War II Besterman served in the British Royal Artillery and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.

[3][6] During the 1950s Besterman began to concentrate on collecting, translating and publishing the writings of Voltaire, including much previously unpublished correspondence.

[3] The Forum for Modern Language Studies termed Besterman's edition of the correspondence "the greatest single piece of Voltairian scholarship for over a century.".

Now the LA's successor organisation, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), gives Besterman/McColvin Awards (often called the Besterman/McColvin Medals) for "outstanding works of electronic resources and e-books".

[16] In 1929, Besterman with Ina Jephson and Samuel Soal performed a series of experiments to test for clairvoyance with controlled conditions.

[17] In 1930 his criticism of Modern Psychic Mysteries, Millesimo Castle, Italy, a book on an Italian medium by Gwendolyn Kelley Hack, caused Arthur Conan Doyle to resign from the society.

He discovered that the sitters had failed to make accurate statements about the conditions and details of the séances and the phenomena that occurred.