We use Krivine's form of the Grothendieck inequality to renorm the space of bounded linear maps acting between Banach lattices. We construct preduals and describe the nuclear operators associated with these preduals for this renormed space of bounded operators as well as for the spaces of $p$-convex, $p$-concave and positive $p$-summing operators acting between Banach lattices and Banach spaces. The nuclear operators obtained are described in terms of factorizations through classical Banach spaces via positive operators.

If $\alpha$ is an ordinal, then the space of all ordinals less than or equal to $\alpha$ is a compact Hausdorff space when endowed with the order topology. Let $C(\alpha)$ be the space of all continuous real-valued functions defined on the ordinal interval $[0, \alpha]$. We characterize the symmetric sequence spaces which embed into $C(\alpha)$ for some countable ordinal $\alpha$. A hierarchy $(E_\alpha)$ of symmetric sequence spaces is constructed so that, for each countable ordinal $\alpha$, $E_\alpha$ embeds into $C(\omega^{\omega^\alpha})$, but does not embed into $C(\omega^{\omega^\beta})$ for any $\beta < \alpha$.

We prove that if $X$ is a complex strictly monotone sequence space with $1$-un\-con\-di\-tion\-al basis, $Y \subseteq X$ has no bands isometric to $\ell_2^2$ and $Y$ is the range of norm-one projection from $X$, then $Y$ is a closed linear span a family of mutually disjoint vectors in $X$. We completely characterize $1$-complemented subspaces and norm-one projections in complex spaces $\ell_p(\ell_q)$ for $1 \leq p, q < \infty$. Finally we give a full description of the subspaces that are spanned by a family of disjointly supported vectors and which are $1$-complemented in (real or complex) Orlicz or Lorentz sequence spaces. In particular if an Orlicz or Lorentz space $X$ is not isomorphic to $\ell_p$ for some $1 \leq p < \infty$ then the only subspaces of $X$ which are $1$-complemented and disjointly supported are the closed linear spans of block bases with constant coefficients.