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Prisoner-of-war work is the name given to intricately crafted small objects created from carved bone or wood and straw marquetry by captured French prisoners languishing in the hulks and other jails during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

THE Inland Revenue are calling for more firms to use their new Business Payment Support Service after receiving more than 44,500 phone calls asking for help since it was launched in November.

THE flagship art sales in London saw a good take up last week after estimates were cut by as much as 40 per cent from their boom levels.

ATG Media have launched their bid to replace eBay as the primary provider of live online auctions. There have been several companies jockeying for position since the demise of eBay Live Auctions at the end of last year, but ATG Media, who also own Antiques Trade Gazette, argue that their new partnership scheme offers the best deal.

BOND Street dealership Mallett have replaced chief executive Lanto Synge in the wake of the company’s weakening performance and rising costs.

Remarkable for both their size and their original condition, this pair of Italian console tables c,1760 sold for £28,000 Semley Auctioneers of Shaftesbury in Dorset on January 24.

IT doesn’t happen very often that either Sotheby’s or Christie’s can claim a major sales victory over their rivals, but at the latest Old Masters series in New York one side came out the clear winners.

A LEADING fine art insurer has alerted UK auctioneers that they may be breaking the law in the way they provide insurance cover for items consigned for auction.

MEMENTOS of the notorious Kray Twins amassed while they served life sentences in Parkhurst and Broadmoor were offered in some 160 lots at Chiswick Auctions on the evening of January 26.

Fittingly for a man whose career started in the 1930s, last week's sale of the Roger Warner collection at Christie's South Kensington was just like old times.

Inertia again characterised the Antiques Collectors' Club's annual Antique Furniture Index (AFI) in 2008. But in a year when so many economic investments ended up performing poorly, a negligible fall of one per cent was far from devastating.

Readers are being urged to be aware of a new batch of counterfeit Troika wares that are being offered for sale on eBay.

Today Robert Baden-Powell is best known as the founder of the Boy Scout movement in 1908, but in the Edwardian era his name was synonymous with the Boer War, and specifically the 217 wretched days from October 1899 to May 1900.

THE appeal of Paris as an auction centre for jewellery received a boost at the start of the year, when France slashed import VAT on “rare” or “high value” jewellery from 19.6 per cent to 5.5 per cent.

Among the highlights at the most recent sale conducted by advertising and bottle specialists BBR was this miniature shaft and globe bottle in dark olive green glass vessel probably used for pharmaceutical purposes c.1660-70.

SOTHEBY’S and Christie’s have all but abandoned guarantees for lots at auction. When asked their policy for the coming year, the salerooms said that they were almost entirely eliminating the practice, although they did not rule out using it completely.

The Irish Government have decided to go the same way as the UK in not applying the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) to the heirs of dead artists until 2012. The extension means that ARR will continue to apply to works by living artists only.

A CHALK drawing of an ‘elephant graveyard’ appeared earlier this month at the entrance to the Portobello Road Market. The three-dimensional pavement art depicting an elephant carcass was the work of representatives for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), who in recent years have singled out the weekly antiques market in its campaign to curb the illegal trade in modern elephant ivory.

SALES in 2008 in Paris saw Sotheby’s and Christie’s occupy the top two spots for the first time – and open up a significant gap on the rest of the field.

VIDEO art and other installations now legally count as sculpture for import purposes after a court ruling in a dispute over VAT.