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Police are appealing for owners of various antiques to come forward. The items – two brass vases, a gold cup, a Chinese vase, a gold frame of a picture of fruit, a gold frame of a picture of flowers and a gold watch - relate to an on-going criminal investigation. The items are currently in the care of the police.

This Arts and Crafts music cabinet, entered into a recent sale at Robertson’s of Kinbuck, near Dunblane, without reserve, turned out to be a hitherto lost design by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Stack’s Bowers Galleries of Irvine, California, have set a new global auction record for a coin at a hammer price of $8.525m (£5.61m).

Peers in the House of Lords have made a last-ditch plea to the Government to scrap plans to review design rights under copyright law.

The collection of close to 500 silver and gold objects donated to the Ashmolean museum in Oxford by the late dealer-collector Michael Wellby has been described as the most important bequest of its type for over a century.

Results from the first timed auction on the-saleroom.com, hosted last month for McTear’s of Glasgow, indicate that this style of selling has a useful role to play alongside established live auctions of fine art and antiques.

Green shoots in the market for the most iconic of all English furniture was among the more encouraging findings of the Antique Furniture Price Index in 2012.

In 1881, at around the time of his 18th birthday, the orphan and Eton College schoolboy John Edmund Hugh Balfour went on a major spending spree.

Christie’s have released global sales figures of £3.92bn, a 10% annual rise. The figure, which includes buyer’s premium, represents the highest sales total in the company’s history.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions say 2012 was their best year to date, with total sales of more than $860m.

The handwritten draft of one of John Betjeman’s best-known poems, ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, is just one of the gems in the next tranche of the Roy Davids Collection to appear at Bonhams Bond Street.

A group of hitherto unknown 19th century documents has come to light revealing illegal trafficking of Chinese people to Latin America where they were forced into slavery.

Medals and other material relating to George William Hutson, a British athlete who served in the First World War, will be offered for sale at Peacocks on February 1 in Bedford.

Frank Marshall’s two-day sale on January 29-30 in Knutsford, Cheshire, will include this painting by Laslett John Pott (1837-1898).

Andrew Smith & Son’s January 29 sale in Winchester includes this winter landscape by Frederick Marinus Kruseman (1816-82).

The name of the late London dealer Ernest Ohly, who enjoyed international renown during his lifetime, was on everyone’s mind at one of 2013’s first major provincial sales.

A rare American coin from a schoolboy’s coin collection was knocked down at auction for £185,000 at Salisbury saleroom Woolley & Wallis this week.

The Association of Accredited Auctioneers (Triple-A), founded in 2012 by 19 UK auctioneers to attract Chinese buyers, are to hold an auction of Western fine art and antiques in China.

‘Masterpiece London’ has appointed Nazy Vassegh as chief executive with immediate effect. This is a newly created position at the fair and, according to a statement released last week, Nazy’s role will be to build and develop the fair’s brand both nationally and internationally.

For the first time this year, ‘Master Paintings Week’ and ‘Master Drawings London’ will combine together under the new umbrella title of ‘London Art Week’ from June 28 to July 5.