Arthur Kenneth Chesterton scarcely survived his first year of life. Escaping the Boer War, his mother, Ethel, undertook a harrowing journey with her infant son across the seas to England. Her husband, Arthur George Chesterton, one of the managers of a South African gold mine, sought to join them but died soon after reaching Britain, the first of many traumas to beset the boy and then the man. Chesterton's stepfather contributed to his insecurity by aloofness, by discipline, and by packing the boy off to public school.

Chesterton's departure from boarding school coincided with the first year of World War I, and in 1915 he contrived to join the British colonial army despite being underage. Sent to East Africa, he suffered greatly from disease and foul conditions, almost died of malaria and dysentery, and was allowed home to recover his health. After officer training, he ended up on the Western Front in 1917, led troops in an attack against the Hindenburg line, and was subsequently decorated with a military cross. Like so many other future fascists, his war experience was crucial to his repudiation of democracy and search for authoritarianism.

The war left Chesterton broken in health and an alcoholic. For a few years he held down a job with the Johannesburg Star, thus unwittingly embarking on a lifelong career in journalism. In quest of other newspaper opportunities, he made his way back to England and secured a job with the Stratford-on-Avon Herald, where, as the theatre critic from 1925 to 1929, he cultivated his aesthetic sense of societal decadence and cultural decline. In 1929, he became the editor-in-chief of a group of provincial newspapers headed by the Torquay Times. For the next four years, according to Baker, he tilted at windmills and sharpened his skills as a controversialist while the Great Depression deepened and the bankruptcy of liberal and capitalist democracy became apparent. The corporate state, he came to believe, would rule in the interests of the whole nation, whereas democracy was the plaything of special interests and privilege.

Gravitating to London and marrying a Fabian socialist and pacifist, Chesterton found himself living near the headquarters of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. He took to dropping by for conversation and argument, and by late 1933 he had joined the movement. It is much to be regretted, as Baker notes, that there is no evidence as to what it was about the BUF's ideas that attracted Chesterton. One may speculate that he was drawn especially to the BUF's charismatic leader, a war hero and dashing figure of a man, who was in every sense a great man in the tradition of Thomas Carlyle. For his part, Mosley recognized Chesterton's evident skills as a writer and editor and soon put him to work on various publications, commissioning Chesterton to write an official biography of the BUF's chief, which duly came out in 1936 as Portrait of a Leader.

Chesterton's old demon of alcoholism, combined with overwork, led to a "nervous breakdown." Mosley recommended he consult a German neurologist, and for six winter months of 1936-1937 he lived in Germany. This stay provided him with ample opportunity to observe the Nazi regime and German society, but again details are lacking. It is not the author's fault, but some of the most important facets of Chesterton's life remain concealed due to a lack of pertinent evidence.

Chesterton returned to Britain in the spring of 1937 and published a series of articles in the Blackshirt describing his impressions of the new Germany, which earned him appointment as editor of the Blackshirt. This position provided what would become a convenient pulpit for his increasingly anti-Semitic rhetoric.

According to Baker, the close rapport between Chesterton and Mosley was short-lived, due in part to the latter's preoccupation with electioneering strategy on the local and national level. Chesterton was far more interested in the purity of BUF ideology, and he decided to resign from the organization in March 1938, to write more freely on his pet themes of anti-Semitism, Nazi greatness, and democratic failure. It comes as quite a surprise in this biography to find Chesterton repudiating Hitler in March 1939, just when the Nazis took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. As war clouds loomed on the horizon during that summer of 1939, Chesterton found himself being trailed by a presumed representative of Scotland Yard's Special Branch. Yet that did not deter him from seeking a commission in the British Army shortly after the outbreak of war. As an officer, he was stationed at Chester, and to his great annoyance found himself being ostracized because of his former BUF affiliation and his continued anti-Semitic writing. Due to his war record and his volunteering to serve Chesterton managed to avoid incarceration under illegal and immoral Defence of the Realm Regulation 18B, even though Mosley and hundreds of other British fascists were interned. Instead, he volunteered for active duty in Africa and ended up in Kenya.

His health broken, Chesterton was sent back to Britain, where in 1944, he became deputy editor of the right-wing publication Truth, a post he retained for nearly 10 years. Appointed by Lord Beaverbrook nine years later to be one of his "literary advisers," he occasionally contributed to the Daily and the Sunday Express. Although he worked for Beaverbrook for less than a year, that was sufficient time to ghostwrite the publisher's autobiography, Don't Trust to Luck. He soon began his own publication, Candour, which he continued issuing for the rest of his life.

In 1954, Chesterton formed a pressure group called the League of Empire Loyalists. Some years later, in 1967, he merged this group with other organizations such as the British National Party, the Greater Britain Movement, and the Racial Preservation Society, to form the National Front. Chesterton became its first chairman, but his involvement was tempered by his absence each winter when he went to South Africa for purposes of restoring his now precarious health. He resigned from the National Front in 1971 and died two years later. Summarizing his post-Second World War career one could say  that it was Chesterton'sl privilege to go down in modern history as the man most responsible for keeping alive, spreading and developing the British tradition of conspiracy thinking.... The core of Chesterton's post-fascist creed was a mixture of right-wing Tory empire loyalism and conspiratorial anti-globalism".

A.K Chesterton's great book "The New Unhapy Lords" is a long term and damning indictment of the New World Order - all White Nationalists should read it.