UK

In the year of the 150th anniversary of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s birth, Lyon & Turnbull has sold the very key used to open his design masterpiece, The Glasgow School of Art, in 1899.

Military badges offered at Bosleys provided a good snapshot of a niche collecting area.

Alan Wheatley Art opens a retrospective of the art of Modern British artist Alan Davie (1920-2014) this week.

Keeley Harris of Discover Vintage launched the ambitious Festival of Vintage at York Racecourse in 2011 and each year the line-up gets bigger.

BADA has clarified a key element of the government’s proposals for a near-complete ivory ban – the stipulation that all items qualifying for the ‘rarest and most important of its type’ and portrait miniature exemptions must be 100 years old.

A gripping story which, until recently, has remained shrouded in mystery, provides the backdrop for an intriguing test of the market for SAS medals.

Celebrated in the thoroughly modern way with a Google Doodle on April 3 on what would have been his 325th birthday was John Harrison.

To mark the centenary of the founding of the Royal Air Force, London auction house Spink is holding a special public exhibition featuring medals and relics on loan from prominent collectors.

A veteran of the Afghanistan war, a sniper who fought on for 90 minutes after being shot in the neck, is selling his medals in a London auction as he returns to civilian life.

Collection of more than 100 travel accounts is one highlight of a varied London auction.

An estimate of £120-150 was never going to do for a lot in a Leominster sale of March 28 that was catalogued, in full, as “STEIN, Sir Aurel, Serindia, a Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost, four vols, and a box with maps (5)”.

An exhibition of works by LS Lowry (1887-1976) has recently moved from Peter Harrington’s Dover Street shop to its Fulham Road location where it is on show until April 28.

A reminder of a fair we previewed in January: Caroline Brown’s second vintage furniture and homewares fair takes place on Saturday and Sunday, April 28-29.

Bought recently for just £70 in a job lot, this German military-issue Leitz lens below sold for £5500 in Special Auction Services (17.5 buyer’s premium) Photographica sale on March 13. The Hektor 13.5cm f/4.5 lens, offered with an estimate of £4000-6000, sold to the European trade.

Something of a rarity, To Iceland in a Yacht appears to have no other auction appearances to its name. It was privately printed in Edinburgh in 1873 for its author, the chemist Robert Angus Smith (1817-84), a man best known for his work on air pollution and his identification of what later came to be known as acid rain.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Kensington Church Street dealer Simon Spero is to sell his personal collection of English blue and white porcelain at a special exhibition next month.

Prof Antony Charles Thomas (1928- 2016) may have been a “towering figure in British academic archaeology during the second half of the 20th century” but another area of interest is betrayed by his Who’s Who entry.

Sotheby’s has made a u-turn on its pledge to scrap fees for purchasers at its online-only auctions.

To address the increasing number of fakes, The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) has launched a new digital ‘hallmark’ for editioned bronzes.