It is known that there exists a first-order sentence that holds in a finite group if and only if the group is soluble. Here it is shown that the corresponding statements with ‘solubility’ replaced by ‘nilpotence’ and ‘perfectness’, among others, are false.

These facts present difficulties for the study of pseudofinite groups. However, a very weak form of Frattini’s theorem on the nilpotence of the Frattini subgroup of a finite group is proved for pseudofinite groups.

Wreath products of nondiscrete locally compact groups are usually not locally compact groups, nor even topological groups. As a substitute introduce a natural extension of the wreath product construction to the setting of locally compact groups. Applying this construction, we disprove a conjecture of Trofimov, constructing compactly generated locally compact groups of intermediate growth without any open compact normal subgroup.

We describe various classes of infinitely presented groups that are condensation points in the space of marked groups. A well-known class of such groups consists of finitely generated groups admitting an infinite minimal presentation. We introduce here a larger class of condensation groups, called infinitely independently presentable groups, and establish criteria which allow one to infer that a group is infinitely independently presentable. In addition, we construct examples of finitely generated groups with no minimal presentation, among them infinitely presented groups with Cantor–Bendixson rank 1, and we prove that every infinitely presented metabelian group is a condensation group.

We investigate the conjugacy growth of finitely generated linear groups. We show that finitely generated non-virtually-solvable subgroups of GLd have uniform exponential conjugacy growth and in fact that the number of distinct polynomials arising as characteristic polynomials of the elements of the ball of radius n for the word metric has exponential growth rate bounded away from 0 in terms of the dimension d only.

Let A be a locally compact abelian group, and H a locally compact group acting on A. Let G=H⋉A be the semidirect product, assumed σ-compact. We prove that the pair (G,A) has Kazhdan’s property T if and only if the only countably approximable H-invariant mean on the Borel subsets of the Pontryagin dual , supported at the neighbourhood of the trivial character, is the Dirac measure.

Our main result is that a finitely generated nilpotent group has no isometric action on an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space with dense orbits. In contrast, we construct such an action with a finitely generated metabelian group.