Textiles are usually low on the pecking order of objects in museums and galleries. "As far as we know," says Amelia Peck, Interwoven Globe's lead curator, "this is the first time that anyone has created an exhibition that uses textiles to tell the story of worldwide trade in the early modern period. (Vickery, 2013b).

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

Children with erratic bedtimes are more likely to have behavioural problems – including hyperactivity, problems with peers and emotional difficulties – and demonstrate symptoms similar to jet lag. (Topping, 2013).

As the Guardian's Alexis Petridis pointed out at the time, the Bowie story is so well-known that "unless it's content to retell a very hackneyed story indeed, David Bowie Is has to find a way of casting new light on some of the most over-analysed and discussed music in rock history." (Bury, 2013b).

Although shunga, meaning "spring picture" or "pillow picture", was a mainstream artistic genre for several centuries, enjoyed by ordinary townspeople as well as aristocrats, it was suppressed in the 20th century when Japan opened up to the west and the country went through an accelerated "modernisation".

At that point, instead of being regarded as a part of the texture of everyday life, presented to brides upon their marriages for instruction, arousal or amusement, shunga "was treated like pornography", (Higgins, 2013b).

For the study, psychologists went into pre-school classrooms and taught 40 children aged three to nearly five years old a simple computer game. It required them to memorise the positions on a grid of images including a cat, an umbrella, and a policeman. The children were trained from 10am until they could remember the positions of around 75% of the pictures.

The scientists visited each child twice over the course of the study. On one visit, the child slept for an hour or so between 1pm and 3pm, and stayed awake on the other. To see how sleep affected their memory, the scientists tested each child again later the same afternoon.

Those who napped saw no change in their morning score of 75%, but the ones who stayed awake fared much worse, averaging scores of 65%, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"If they stayed awake they forgot more of the items they had remembered in the morning, whereas if they took a nap, they remembered all the items they had learned in the morning," said Rebecca Spencer at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. (Sample. 2013).

It dates from around 1580, and is believed to be the earliest depiction of the animal in England. It was painted at a time when guinea pigs, tender chunks of protein in South America, were beginning to be imported by the Spanish as exotic pets for wealthy Europeans.

The identity of the three solemn children, magnificently and uncomfortably dressed at seven, six and five years old, is also unknown. The youngest is holding a goldfinch, popular pets with children because of their beautiful plumage, but often with religious overtones in portraits because the birds were also used in depictions of the infant Christ. The sturdy older brother was evidently judged too grown up at six for a pet. (Kennedy, 2013a).

'Make it new.' Ezra Pound commanded Modernist artists. They did so, and critics have been trying to explain their work ever since. Traditionally, art was supposed to either portray the world or else inspire its audience with ideas of beauty, truth and goodness. Modernist art appeared to do  neither. Paintings seemed to be a mixture of strange abstractions and savage distortions; novels appeared to have abandoned grammar and syntax as well as story and plot, while poetry had collapsed into a heap of broken images. It no longer even rhymed, for goodness' sake.

Was this the end of civilisation? Well, yes, it was actually. the First World War destroyed the belief that history was progress and that human behaviour improved with each passing age. There was nothing beautiful or good about the dead at Verdun. How did one speak about such horrors? ...

One of the main characteristics of Modernist art was its passion for experiment. The world had changed and so must art. However tempted we may be to think of the notorious complexity of Modernism as a form of intellectual indulgence, it was, in fact, a genuine attempt to find adequate forms of representation for discoveries such as those by Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis and Albert Einstein in physics.

But there are those scholars, most notably John Carey, who see Modernism as no more than an exercise in snobbery. Modernist art, he claims in 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' (1992), was designed to exclude hoi polloi, which was the next best thing to exterminating them. James Joyce's remark about 'Ulysses', that he'd "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant" may seem to lend some support to Carey's claim, until we remember that Joyce's characters are as flawed and fleshy as those who outraged artistic sensibilities by having fun in Blackpool. Nevertheless, there is a case for seeing the development of Modernism as a reaction to the rise of popular culture. ...

Enter Laura Frost, pooh-poohing such nonsense. The idea that there is a fundamental opposition between Modernism and mass culture is a myth, albeit a stubborn one. This is not a particularly original idea: there are versions of it in Andreas Huyssen's 1986 work 'After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism' and, more recently, John Xiros Cooper in  'Modernism and the Culture of Market Society' (2004). In fact the argument was in danger of dwindling into a cliche. But not any longer: Frost has reanimated the whole debate. (Day, 2013, pp.46-47).

The subcultures explored include familiar ones like New Romantic (see that pirate shirt and stagewear worn by Toyah Wilcox), Goth and Rave, represented with Vivienne Westwood's spring/summer 1985 collection complete with that badge from Shoom.

Then there are more obscure ones, ripe for discovery by a new generation of fashion students. (Cochrane, 2013a).