We introduce the class of slicely countably determined Banach spaces which contains in particular all spaces with the RNP and all spaces without copies of $ell_1$. We present many examples and several properties of this class. We give some applicatio
ns to Banach spaces with the Daugavet and the alternative Daugavet properties, lush spaces and Banach spaces with numerical index 1. In particular, we show that the dual of a real infinite-dimensional Banach with the alternative Daugavet property contains $ell_1$ and that operators which do not fix copies of $ell_1$ on a space with the alternative Daugavet property satisfy the alternative Daugavet equation.
We show that a Banach space with numerical index one cannot enjoy good convexity or smoothness properties unless it is one-dimensional. For instance, it has no WLUR points in its unit ball, its norm is not Frechet smooth and its dual norm is neither
smooth nor strictly convex. Actually, these results also hold if the space has the (strictly weaker) alternative Daugavet property. We construct a (non-complete) strictly convex predual of an infinite-dimensional $L_1$ space (which satisfies a property called lushness which implies numerical index~1). On the other hand, we show that a lush real Banach space is neither strictly convex nor smooth, unless it is one-dimensional. In particular, if a subspace $X$ of the real space $C[0,1]$ is smooth or strictly convex, then $C[0,1]/X$ contains a copy of $C[0,1]$. Finally, we prove that the dual of any lush infinite-dimensional real space contains a copy of $ell_1$.
