Miscellaneous photometric variations in cataclysmic variables: V455 And, SS Cyg, AQ Men, LQ Peg, RW Tri and UX UMa

•Previous reports on negative superhumps in V455 And are confirmed, but a suspected positive superhump is not real.•The long-term evolution of pulsation frequencies in V455 And is characterized.•The waveform of orbital variations of SS Cyg changes from year to year but not as a function of phase in the outburst cycle.•AQ Men shows brightness modulations on weekly and hourly time-scales, the latter being incompatible with previous observations.•A negative superhump, reported to be present in RW Tri in 1957 and 1994, is not seen at other epochs.•The peculiar photometric behaviour of UX UMa observed in 2015 is not repeated in other years. Cataclysmic variables are among the photometrically most unstable star in the zoo of stellar objects, exhibiting light variations on all time-scales between millennia and seconds. The literature is full of reports on variable phenomena which often require independent confirmation before they can be accepted as established facts. In this contribution I investigate accounts on miscellaneous variable features observed in six cataclysmic variables, drawing for this purpose largely on archival data, most of which have not been investigated in detail in the past, and complementing these data with some new observations. This enabled to confirm and expand upon some hitherto unconfirmed features in the light curves of these star, as well as the rejection of some others, while in still other cases an unambiguous answer to questions arising from previous papers was not possible.