The “fairies” looked completely immobile with ... staunch and somewhat aggressive pro-spiritualist position. Arthur Conan Doyle’s stubbornness in the context of his spiritualist beliefs ...

Conan Doyle became a leader of the movement, defending it in lectures around the world. Even the embarrassing Cottingley fairy hoax, in which he had championed faked photographs of wood fairies ...

But Conan Doyle was a footballer, cricketer, skier, a campaigner against the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and most startlingly, a practising spiritualist who also believed in fairies.