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Tiffany & Co have appealed over the ruling that eBay do not have to police their auction site for fakes before they are sold to unwitting buyers.

AT Sotheby's on July 17, a wooden file box containing nearly 4000 index cards compiled by the father of professional forensic pathology, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, sold at £15,000 to a collector.

The FBI are attempting to track down the rightful owners of 137 works of art, discovered in a New York apartment, which are thought to have been stolen in the 1960s and 70s.

A previously unheard tape of a Beatles recording session, in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney break into giggles and crack jokes, has fetched £10,000 at Cameo auctioneers in Midgham, Berkshire.

Stolen art and antiques valued at tens of millions of pounds remain at large despite the incarceration of five members of the notorious Johnson family who bragged in a 2005 BBC documentary that they would gladly steal from “the lords, the sirs and the ladies”.

Isle of Wight firm Island Auction Rooms established a new record for a clock sold by a UK provincial auctioneer when this remarkable longcase took £240,000 on August 7.

SOTHEBY’S dependence on the contemporary art market could hardly be clearer than in their latest set of figures.

Christie’s have announced that they are to sell the multi-million collection of Yves St Laurent, who died in June, and his business partner Pierre Bergé in February next year.

This Carrs of Carlisle biscuit tin looks like pretty much any other Christmas biscuit tin from 1941 – except that it happens to be unopened.

CHRISTIE’S first wine sale in Asia for seven years will take place in November after the auctioneers have decided to reintroduce wine auctions in Hong Kong.

A MAJOR loan exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud (b.1922) will run from October 9 to December 12 at the St James’s gallery of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1.

An unidentified culprit used counterfeit cash to purchase an item in an auction of general antiques at Peter Francis Auctioneers of West Wales on July 15.

Maurice Collins and the British Library are to hold a display of Weird and Wonderful Inventions and Gadgets, eccentric and ingenious contraptions produced between 1851 and 1951.

North Yorkshire auctioneers Tennants have cut a profitable niche selling the furniture of local craftsman Robert Thompson, but for their July sale they went one better.

TO the connoisseurial mind, it was not the paintings that lit up the Old Master series in London in early July but rather three rediscovered drawings by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) offered in a dedicated Old Master and 19th century works on paper sale at Christie’s on July 8.

A YORKSHIRE dealer lost a lifetime's collection in one night when thieves stole the bulk of his Clarice Cliff stock built up over the last 25 years. Art Deco dealer Muir Hewitt lost around 55 pieces of Clarice Cliff when the thieves targeted his shop in the Redbrick Mill in Batley in the early hours of July 26.

THIS 2in (5cm) long brooch is textbook Lalique. Fashioned as a cicada, its main constituent is glass set into a gold frame. The insect’s body is formed from pâte de verre and the wings from plique à jour enamel, both favourite Lalique materials.

The final chapter in the story of ‘The Colin Wilson Monkeys’ ended quietly on July 30 when they sold at auction for an unspectacular £25,000.

Two major silver collections will be sold by UK provincial salerooms in the autumn season. Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will offer for sale the first part of the Chen collection in London on November 23, while Salisbury’s Woolley & Wallis will complement their October silver sale with a single-owner catalogue devoted to the collection of the late George Petzall.

A REAL rarity was offered by Sussex saleroom Tooveys of Washington on July 15 when this toll pass from 1744 came up for sale. Beautifully preserved in the original shagreen slipcase, this pass would seem to apply particularly to roads that fell within royal estates or administration rather than to a wider system of turnpike and toll roads.