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Exploring Prehistoric & Roman England, by Barry Marsden, published by Greenlight Publishing, 119 Newland Street, Witham, Essex CM8 lWF. Tel: 01376 521900. email: info@greenlightpublishing.co.uk ISBN 1897738 £15sb

Sussex Silver and its Makers, by Timothy Kent, published by JH Bourdon-Smith Ltd. Copies (sb) available at £23 plus £1.50 postage, UK, from JH Bourdon-Smith Ltd at 24 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6BU. Tel: 020 7839 4714

CHRISTIE’S (20.93/11.96% buyer’s premium) eschewed Art Nouveau altogether at their 20th Century Decorative Arts sale on May 20. This short outing was 83 per cent sold by lot (63 from 76) and 87 per cent by value, and raised a premium-inclusive €3.41m (£2.35m).

A man who had a 17th century Dutch panel painting stolen from his home more than 20 years ago has failed in an Appeal Court to win compensation from Christie’s, who offered the picture for sale in 1997. Key to the test case was Christie’s ability to show they had acted in good faith, adding further legal weight to the importance of due diligence.

One of several items consigned to Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury by descendants of the 7th and 9th Dukes of Newcastle for sale on May 13, this Regency mahogany centre table with profusely carved trestle supports in the manner of Thomas Hope surprised auctioneer and vendor alike when it breezed past its £800-1200 estimate to sell for £57,000 (plus 15/10 per cent buyer’s premium).

JUNE is very much the traditional month for London’s high season in the art market. However, in the middle of May we had a taster of the frenzied auction activity usually associated with that month, a mini tsunami of high-flying sales with a clutch of dramatic and record-breaking prices.

It seems that in terms of arriving in numbers after none has been seen for ages, novelty lighthouse cocktail shakers are to Yorkshire what No. 9 buses are to central London. In Antiques Trade Gazette No.1589 dated May 17 we illustrated just such a silver-plated shaker which took £1250 at Andrew Hartley’s Ilkley, West Yorkshire sale on April 9-10.

“Mr Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew Where felons and criminals dwell: We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly For this is the Cadogan Hotel.” These lines by John Betjeman form part of a poem that marks one of the most notorious incidents in late Victorian society – The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.

It was a poignant irony that the contents of the North Hampshire vineyard that had so impressed Her Majesty should come up for auction in the same month that another offering of Château Mouton-Rothschild was making a less than favourable impression with the British establishment.

Many Antiques Trade Gazette readers will be familiar with the name Francis Raeymaekers of ADC Heritage from his days as a dealer in antique silver. After a sojourn in New York, he is back in London with a new venture.

THE provincial scene is nothing if not surprising. The Guildford Auction Rooms received a call from a firm of London solicitors earlier this year to sell a large cardboard box of jewellery from the estate of Marian Wenzel an academic who taught the history of jewellery design.

HOPEFULLY with a host of international collectors and dealers in town for the fairs, there is business to be achieved back at the London shops, and a number of them will be mounting special selling exhibitions during June.

SHOWHOUSES in new housing developments are often a depressing, formulaic affair but this is not the case at the best designed showhouse in town at 20 Aubrey Square, a new residential development of 20 town houses at Campden Hill, Kensington, London W8.

This portrait in oils depicts Willie Park Senior of Musselburgh who won the very first Open Championship held at Prestwick Golf Club in 1860. Painted by an unidentified hand c.1860, when Park first leapt to fame (he won the championship again in 1863, 1866 and 1875), it is believed to be the only known contemporary portrait of a 19th century Open golf champion.

The Imperial War Museum and Manchester Metropolitan University are to carry out a three-year project to catalogue, digitally photograph and publish online 10,000 posters from the museum’s collection.

London’s main photograph auctions took place last week. The high point of the series came at Christie’s on May 20 in a single-owner evening auction of daguerreotypes by the French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, when this image of the Temple of Olympian Zeus on the Acropolis sold for £500,000, reckoned by the auctioneers to be a new auction high for a photograph.

LONDON: POLICE are hunting a robber who escaped with two bronzes from a Chelsea shop after a violent struggle with the dealer. The robber, who struck at the Chelminski Gallery in the King’s Road on Wednesday, May 14, is thought to be the same man who has attempted a number of similar raids at shops in the area over the past two years.

NEW Money Laundering Regulations, affecting dealers and auctioneers, are due to be published in the middle of June with the new code enforceable after a grace period of three months.

AN ARRAY of elegant objects sold mostly within estimates at the Celebration of the English Country House auction at Sotheby’s New York (20/12% buyer’s premium) on April 30 and May 1.

SOLD AT £600 (Temple) in the April 25 sale held by Y Gelli (15% buyer's premium) in Hay-on-Wye was a “much nicer than average” copy of the 1886, privately printed, Lahore first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and other Verses. One of 350 copies of this tall, narrow production, printed on one side only, it was in the original wrappers but with the flap removed, leaving an uneven fore-edge to the upper wrapper.