Letter

Delays and overspends on the Great Western route out of London are frustrating but letters up for auction on April 29 reveal that things didn’t always go smoothly even for the brilliant engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

While relations between the English/Unionist and the Scottish powers-that-be are not exactly cordial at the moment, hopefully it will not lead to battle. If a referendum is indeed held to decide the fate of the union, a ballot rather than the bullet should be sufficient.

An auction house which sold a 1937 handwritten letter by Beatrix Potter is offering another fascinating collection related to the children’s author just over two months later.

Letters from the late Princess Diana surfaced at auction earlier this year in Cambridge and now another set is being offered in Gloucestershire.

The beautiful Beatrix Potter children’s books are highly collectable in themselves but the author’s world provides a far wider and very popular collecting scene.

America’s previously neglected founding father Alexander Hamilton is now firmly back to prominence after the Broadway hit ‘Hamilton’, which won eleven Tony Awards last year. The show is now coming to London's West End this year.

A handwritten poem by Anne Frank has sold at auction in the Netherlands at €140,000 (£119,000).

An impressive collection of pictures, studio pottery, furniture, personal effects and letters has been consigned to auctioneers Mitchells of Cockermouth from the estate of Mary Burkett, former director of Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal.

Only a year before the centenary of the Easter Rising, a powerful letter by the Anglo-Irish diplomat and Irish nationalist Roger David Casement (1864-1916) has surfaced in South Africa.

An autographed letter signed from Charlotte Brontë doubled its estimate to make £24,000 at Lyon & Turnbull’s September 4 rare books, maps and manuscripts sale in Edinburgh.

A letter written by pioneering scientist Dr Francis Crick containing what is probably the first description he gave of the discovery of DNA has been sold for a world auction record.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has acquired an important collection of letters, photos and documents relating to Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank.

At the tender age of 15 young ‘Bob’ Wroughton became the world’s first Boy Scout, and had a glittering career of success in front of him. Yet just seven short years later, he became one of the first to die in the killing fields of the First World War.

Wind in the Willows characters Mole, Ratty and Toad are to go under the hammer at Michael Bowman of Newton Abbot in Devon on May 5.

“ED seriously injured late today when train hit car – Ritch”. When a shocked John Steinbeck received this telegram in May, 1948, he left immediately for Monterey, California, but by the time he got there his good friend Ed Ricketts, the man he later described as being “part of my brain for 18 years”, was dead.

• Stoker's great granddaughter puts unique cache up for sale • Collection includes, letters, photos and even table waresA remarkable collection of documents and artefacts relating to the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13 will be sold by Bamfords of Derby on May 26. The cache of largely unseen material has been entered for sale by the great granddaughter of Edward Archibald McKenzie, a crewman on the expedition supply ship Terra Nova.