UK

Private buying dominated as Essex saleroom Sworders (23% buyer’s premium) offered the selected contents of a Cotswold manor house.

Antiques dealer and furniture designer/maker Christopher Howe hosts a warehouse sale this autumn giving buyers access to his entire stock for the first time in his 30-year career.

Special Auction Services’ (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale in Newbury on July 9 included a wide selection of edged weapons which was topped by a mid-19th century Japanese short sword or tanto estimated at £200-300.

A Battle of Culloden period Clan MacTavish silver inlaid basket-hilted back sword sold for £4800, just below top estimate, at the Antony Cribb (22% buyer’s premium) auction on July 30.

Catalogued together with an incomplete silver propelling pencil with a bloodstone terminal, a silver Art Deco pocket lighter with a timepiece sold at £5200 (estimate £100-200) at Amersham Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) on July 11.

The words ‘country’ and ‘brocante’ have an allure of their own as Lucy Haywood discovered when she founded the Country Brocante store in the village of Midhurst, West Sussex.

One notable consequence of the growing prevalence of charity shops on the high street is that auctioneers are receiving more and more items that these organisations want to check in case they are valuable.

An antiques dealer in the picturesque market town of Bridgnorth in Shropshire is retiring from the trade to concentrate on her writing career.

A fine Victorian building in the town of Cockermouth in the Lake District which was built in 1868 for the founder of Mitchell’s Auctions – whose saleroom is still in the town – is now home to the Fairfield House Antiques Centre.

The huge variety of exotic arms brought back to Europe from the East during colonial days is becoming an increasingly lucrative area of business for auction houses.

The collecting of English military swords is a science in itself.

In the days of the British Raj there was no shortage of would-be shikaris hoping to bag a tiger in India. At the same time plenty of London gunsmiths were ready to supply them with all the fire-power they could persuade them to buy.

Jerrard Nares of Mytton Antiques deals in 18th and 19th century furniture and related decorative small items from his shop in Shrewsbury.

A 19th century Russian shashka sword with fine niello-worked ornament sold for £6700 against an estimate of £250-450 at Amersham Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) on August 1.

Somerset auction shows how bidders are very sensitive to how works are estimated.

Landscape painter Sidney Richard Percy (1821-86) is described in Christopher Wood’s Dictionary of Victorian Painters as “a prolific and variable painter, and his prices vary accordingly”.

The 102nd staging of the London Antique Arms Fair is on Saturday, August 24.

The personal enthusiasm of John Braund of Turpin’s Antiques, who died in January aged 90, was early oak and associated metalware.

A 19th century plaster bust of Napoleon was among sales at the recent Cotswold Decorative Antiques & Art Fair, which takes place in Westonbirt School near Tetbury three times a year.

Coming up on August Bank Holiday Monday (August 26) is an annual event which brings thousands of eager buyers to the grounds of a stately home in Wiltshire.