"I have followed the arch diabolist here from the city.

He was a diabolist, a necromancer, and possibly a vampire.

He was a witch or a diabolist.

"Enough to be canonized as a saint, or to be burnt as a diabolist.

"He was a priest of Enlil, until he turned diabolist and was banished.

This man who says he is Merlinus come back from the dead-he is a diabolist, a worker of infernal miracles.

He commits a series of rapes and murders under the control of the German diabolist, who contorts his mind against those he loves.

And when he "required some Heavenly music" (an achingly long time in coming), it was in the tones of a diabolist urgently seeking absolution.

"I spoke of the diabolist before I thought, and then he forced me to speak his name curse him, I will not sit with ease for weeks!"

I didn't want to worry you about it, especially after the blowup, but-- Well, carry on, and don't forget, we keep a pretty good tax diabolist on retainer."

Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos.

No evidence prior to her torture indicates that Anneke was a diabolist who believed she was doing work for the devil, although she was tried and convicted of both maleficium and diabolism.

In it, Ford Maddox Ford claims to have "cut" a man he thinks was Hilaire Belloc, but which in fact turns out to be "Alestair Crowley, the diabolist" .

Her performance in the play certainly impressed Aleister Crowley, the notorious diabolist, who sent her six lines of doggerel in appreciation, ending "A young thing stole the show away/Her dulcet name is Dulcie Gray".

His brothers Raymond and Hugh were also tall and equally robust (Hugh was a bureaucrat, Raymond an endocrinologist and a mountaineer who had known Aleister Crowley, the diabolist), but they did not have the eyes.

Noted editor and anthologist Ellen Datlow, in volume 3 of her The Best Horror of the Year, wrote: "Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist by Robin Spriggs is a series of well-wrought interconnected prose poems of the ghostly and uncanny."

Sir Francis Dashwood, of Hell Fire Club fame, is another who might have had a hand in such a thing, but he was a free-thinking diabolist and was the last man to start or invent a new religion: if he did, it would have been something on either diabolical or classical lines.

Such wildly imaginative stories earned Tanizaki the tag of "diabolist" and aligned him with influences like Wilde, Poe and Baudelaire - a stark contrast to his Japanese peers at the time, gripped by naturalism and turning out thinly veiled autobiographical fiction in an often anguished confessional mode.