In this paper we study the structure of the Banach space K(E, F) of all compact linear operators between two Banach spaces E and F. We study three distinct problems: weak compactness in K(E, F), subspaces isomorphic to l~ and complementation of K(E, F) in L(E, F), the space of bounded linear operators. In § 2 we derive a simple characterization of the weakly compact subsets of K(E, F) using a c...