What is "crankish"

Usage examples of "crankish".

Any youngster would have burned to be like that lean, crankish man, who could make any solemn matter dance in the quick flame of his mockery, and with one laconic flicker of his scorna mere phrasecould reduce the most earnest pretension to ash!

For more than ten years the present champion was clearly the greatest chess player in the world, but during that time he exhibited such willful and seemingly self-destructive behavior—refusing to enter crucial tournaments, quitting them for crankish reasons while holding a commanding lead, entertaining what many called a paranoid delusion that the whole world was plotting to keep him from reaching the top—that many informed experts wrote him off as a contender for the highest honors.