We give new characterizations of Banach spaces not containing ${\ell }_1$ in terms of integral and $p$-dominated polynomials, extending to the polynomial setting a result of Cardassi and more recent results of Rosenthal.

We study conditions on an infinite dimensional separable Banach space $X$ implying that $X$ is the only non-trivial invariant subspace of $X^{**}$ under the action of the algebra $𝔸\left(X\right)$ of biconjugates of bounded operators on $X$: $𝔸\left(X\right)=\{T^{**}T\in ℬ\left(X\right)\}$. Such a space is called simple. We characterize simple spaces among spaces which contain an isomorphic copy of $c_0$, and show in particular that any space which does not contain ${\ell }_1$ and has property (u) of Pelczynski is simple.

Let $X$ and $E$ be a Banach space and a real Banach lattice, respectively, and let $\Gamma$ denote an infinite set. We give concise proofs of the following results: (1) The dual space $X^{*}$ contains an isometric copy of $c_0$ iff $X^{*}$ contains an isometric copy of ${\ell }_{\infty }$, and (2) $E^{*}$ contains a lattice-isometric copy of $c_0\left(\Gamma \right)$ iff $E^{*}$ contains a lattice-isometric copy of ${\ell }_{\infty }\left(\Gamma \right)$.

We introduce the definition of $p$-limited completely continuous operators, $1\le p<\infty$. The question of whether a space of operators has the property that every $p$-limited subset is relative compact when the dual of the domain and the codomain have this property is studied using $p$-limited completely continuous evaluation operators.

It is shown that the weak $L^p$ spaces ${\ell }^{p,\infty },L^{p,\infty }[0,1]$, and $L^{p,\infty }[0,\infty )$ are isomorphic as Banach spaces.