Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2010
In a series of papers we have analysed the embedding of certain groups H as normal subgroups of absolutely irreducible skew linear groups G, see [7], [8], [9] and [10]. Here we drop the absolutely irreducibility assumption on G. If H is locally finite we derive relatively strong conditions on G, although not as strong as when G is absolutely irreducible. If H is abelian, very much in contrast to the absolutely irreducible case, we show that nothing can be said. The phrase “bounded by an integer-valued function of n only” we abbreviate to “n-bounded”.