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The Exiled Collector: William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House by Anne Sebba, published by John Murray. ISBN 0719563283 £22.50hb.

JOHN Snow’s best-known work, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, deals with his investigations into the London cholera epidemic of 1831-32.

PERIOD if possible, but, above all, practical – this seems to be the current code among furniture buyers in the experience of Amersham Auction Rooms (15% buyer's premium) over the past couple of years.

“A WONDERFUL morning and a dreadful afternoon,” was how auctioneer Elizabeth Pepper-Darling summed up Morphets' (15/10% buyer's premium) 640-lot June 10 sale which was in some ways a microcosm of the auction scene in general.

THE Old Master trade loves a sleeper and at least two dealers were convinced they were on to a major discovery when a woefully under-catalogued “Painter standing beside a canvas depicting cupid, oil on canvas, 45 x 37.5in (1.14m x 95cm)” came under the hammer without any form of attribution or estimate at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire rooms of North East Auctions (15/10% buyer’s premium) on May 23.

A FOUR-page, colour illustrated feature in the April 25 issue of The Sunday Times Magazine will have done nothing to harm the saleroom prospects of a collection of 13 love letters written in the period January 1881-June 1882 by the actress Lillie Langtry, “the adored pin-up whose affairs rocked Victorian Britain”, and on May 13 Cumbrian auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth sold the lot for £5000.

AFTER four years, from July 9 to 11, Harrogate-based Galloway Antiques Fairs return to Alnwick Castle, Northumberland to revive their Alnwick Castle Antiques Fair.