These were tolerated as crankish anachronisms with negligible political influence.

Over time, the foundation shed its crankish air, turning its attention from trying to block gravity to trying to understand it.

Try though he might to control himself, he feared that his senility and his crankish ways would shock callers and be what future generations would remember him by.

They were on the fringe, dissidents who stood in defiance of whole societies, noisy but lonely protesters who were tiresome with their crankish litanies for a single, seemingly marginal cause.

In recounting his stormy 30-year friendship with V. S. Naipaul, the author reveals as much about himself and his ambitions as he does about his flawed, crankish mentor, to whom he was mysteriously drawn.

In addition he has stressed the crankish nature of many of its supporters and the fact that it drew that support from only a very small section of the working class - even though they may have formed a significant proportion of the BUF's small membership of between 5,000 and 40,000 members throughout the 1930s.

If I were the sort of amateur scholar who nurtured a crankish pet theory about Shakespeare-and I'm not, I promise-mine would have to do with hidden references in "Henry V" to the relationship between Catherine of Valois and Owen Tudor, whom she took up with after Henry's death.