Why is this look taking off nearly 100 years after it was first worn? Fashion loves putting a spotlight on something obscure and, without an obvious subculture (the 60s, say), this particular style hasn't been cool before. It was a bit dowdy and make-do – but, in austerity Britain, that's perfect. (Cochrane, 2013h).

The advert sparked a debate over skin tone and education levels. Many believed the inference to be that darker-skinned students are less intelligent than their lighter-skinned colleagues in a country where fairer skin has long been equated with higher class – as a whiter complexion suggests a life not spent toiling on a farm. (Hodal, 2013b).

Reed was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, the son of a tax accountant and a former beauty queen. Growing up from the age of 11 on Long Island, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital for electroconvulsive therapy, intended to cure him of a general hostility to his parents and what they believed to be homosexual instincts. (Williams, 2013).

Many academics prefer research, writing and conferencing to the hard tutorial grind. (Jenkins, 2013).

Fashion's current preoccupation with art is effectively the death knell of the minimalist look – most art (Donald Judd and his ilk aside) is about getting messy. This new abandon is evident even at Céline – once home of no-spillage minimalism – where paint swooshes filled the spring collection. While a Dior campaign out now features the very-refined Marion Cotillard contrasted against drips of paint on a wall, the paint splatter of an artist's studio clothes is set to become the motif of 2014. As well as Céline, a pair of splattered trousers in the J Crew collection already have a buzz about them and Martin Margiela has a pair of very smart brogues covered in paint. Messy, but pleasingly so. (Cochrane, 2013g).

Going forward

Top of many people's hate-list is this now-ubiquitous way of saying "from now on" or "in future". It has the added sly rhetorical aim of wiping clean the slate of the past; indeed, it is a kind of incantation or threat aimed at shutting down conversation about whatever bad thing has happened. (Poole, 2013).

Actually all the pictures were taken by reknowned spoof photographer Alison Jackson and a cast of lookalikes. (Guardian, 2013b).

Why are nearly all blouses today transparent? And as they are transparent, what do manufacturers expect us to do? Flashing one's bra is one of the many, many things that might work in fashion shoots but doesn't translate so easily into real life (see also: standing with one's feet pointing inwards duck-like, adopting half-dead facial expressions). So, aside from the rare brave exceptions, this is not an option open to most women. (Freeman, 2013g).

Oxford University's department of child and adolescent psychiatry has discovered that children who spend time in nurseries are more likely to develop behavioural and emotional problems. This will confuse and depress working parents and encourage them to drink more. (Christie, 2013).

Some historians fetishise documents, and historians of empire are among the most hide-bound. For decades, these scholars have viewed written evidence as sacrosanct. That documents – like all forms of evidence – must be triangulated, and interrogated for veracity using other forms of evidence, including oral testimonies from colonised populations, mattered little. (Elkins, 2013).