This note has two goals. The first is to give a short and self contained introduction to the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity for standard graded ring $R$ over a general base ring. The second is to present a simple and concise proof of a classical result due to Cutkosky, Herzog and Trung and, independently, to Kodiyalam asserting that the regularity of powers of an homogeneous ideal $I$ of $R$ is eventually a linear function in $v$. Finally we show how the flexibility of the definition of the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity over general base rings can be used to give a simple characterization of the ideals whose powers have a linear resolution in terms of the regularity of the Rees ring.

The paper is dedicated to David Eisenbud on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday