Bernard Newman was born in Ibstock, Leicestershire, in 1897. He was a great nephew of the 19th century author George Eliot. After having served in the secret services during the First World War, ending the war as a captain, he became a lecturer and passionate traveller, visiting over sixty countries during the Interbellum, many of those on bike. He gave some 2,000 lectures between 1928 and 1940 throughout Europe, meeting even Adolf Hitler. He started writing novels, gaining some recognition with his 1930 novel The Cavalry Went Through. From 1936 to 1938, he was the first chairman of the Society of Civil & Public Service Writers.

At the start of the Second World War, Newman was in France, witnessing the invasion by the Germans. For the next five years, he became a staff lecturer at the Ministry of Information and wrote patriotic British novels like Siegfried Spy and Death to the Fifth Column. The novel Secret Weapon featured Winston Churchill. In 1942, he was sent to Canada and the United States to lecture there on the British and the war. In Washington, he encountered President Roosevelt and lectured for senators and other high officials. He also was a guest in national and local radio broadcasts throughout the country. Returning to the United Kingdom in late 1942, he reversed his role and lectured throughout the country about America.

Bernard Newman was also considered an authority on spies, and wrote Epics of Espionage and the novel Spy. His 1945 novel Spy Catchers was praised as one of the best books ever on counter-espionage.

His science fiction novel The Blue Ants has been described by professor Paul Brian in his study Atomic War in Fiction as an "absurd classic of Sinophobia" and "perhaps the earliest example of a fictional Russo-Chinese nuclear war"

Bernard Newman was a Chevalier in the Légion d'honneur.

• The Cavalry Went Through (1930, Victor Gollancz)
• Hosanna! (1935, Denis Archer)
• Spy (1935, 12 editions by 1938: banned in Germany, used as a textbook in Russia)
• Pedalling Poland (1935, Herbert Jenkins)
• Albanian Back-door (1936, Herbert Jenkins)
• Secret Servant (1937)
• Woman Spy (1937)
• The Story of Poland (1940, Hutchinson)
• Siegfried Spy (1940)
• Savoy! Corsica! Tunis! (1940)
• The Secrets of German Espionage (1940, The Right Book Club)
• Death to the Fifth Column (1941)
• One Man's View (1941)
• Secret Weapon (1942)
• The New Europe (1942, MacMillan: translated in Spanish in 1944)
• American Journey (1943)
• British Journey (1945, Robert Hale)
• Balkan Background (1945)
• Spy Catchers (1945, collection of short stories)
• The Spy in the Brown Derby (1945-1946)
• Russia's Neighbour, the New Poland (1946, Victor Gollancz)
• The Red Spider Web: The Story of Russian Spying in Canada (1947, Lattimer)
• The Flying Saucer (1948, Victor Gollancz: also translated in German)
• Tito's Yugoslavia (1952)
• Morocco Today (1953)
• Report on Indochina (1953, Robert Hale)
• Speaking from Memory (1960, Herbert Jenkins: memoirs)
• The World of Espionage (1962, Souvenir Press: translated the same year in German as Spionage: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Bechtle))
• The Blue Ants: The First Authentic Account of the Russian-Chinese War of 1970 (1962, translated in Dutch in 1970)
• Behind the Berlin Wall (1964, Robert Hale)
• Background to Vietnam (1965, Roy Publishers)
• Turkey and the Turks (1968, Herbert Jenkins)
• Spy and counter spy: Bernard Newman's story of the British Secret Service (1970, Hall)

• Death at the Wicket: story, included in The Rupa Book of Great Crime Stories by Ruskin Bond

• As Don Betteridge, he wrote 14 mystery novels in the series Tiger Lester, some of them translated in Dutch, French, German and Spanish.