Parents will now be shelling out hundreds of pounds as kids fill up football World Cup sticker albums and negotiate playground swaps in a now time-honoured fashion. Back in the mid-19th century the photo collecting craze was all about the carte de visite, as a May 3 auction underlines.

Nancy Mitford was so enamoured with a particular bed that she wrote about it lovingly in the 1950s.

A look at the latest moves in the trade.

When a piece of Hans Coper stoneware made an astonishing £305,000 hammer price from an online bid recently it posed a classic ‘state of the market’ question.

The sale of a skeleton of a newly discovered species of carnivorous dinosaur to be sold by Aguttes auction house in Paris this June offers the opportunity to name it after the buyer.

High at the top of any list of seminal moments in rock history will be Pete Townshend’s penchant for often destroying guitars at the end of a gig with The Who.

A series of enamel murals by a Polish artist once imprisoned in a Russian gulag who later trained as an RAF Spitfire pilot are coming to auction after the revamp of Heathrow Terminal One.

Despite Lego and Star Wars hogging the headlines when it comes to high prices paid out recently by toy collectors, the ‘old school’ has struck back to land a blow for more venerable brands.

The organisers of the inaugural Antique Arms Fair at Olympia London last September hope to build on the positive feedback from that event with the second one coming up in April.

The suffragette memorabilia collecting market throws up some pretty strange items at times but few can be more unusual than the board game Pank-a-Squith.

While the record-breaking Victoria Cross medal sold in November last year may have eluded him, Lord Ashcroft is far from inactive when it comes to buying more of these honours for his medals gallery at the Imperial War Museum in London.

A round-up of people in the news across the art and antiques world.

I interviewed Fred Dibnah once, as a wet-behind-the-ears journalism student in Preston. He had just come down from the third-tallest church spire in the country at St Walburge’s, which dominates the city skyline at 309ft high.