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UK: FOUR weeks of expert evidence and deliberation has ended with the Parliamentary Select Committee needing the chairman’s casting vote to keep the Kent Bill from being thrown out.

UK: Lot 1098 at the Leominster rooms of Brightwells auctioneers offered the clock trade the chance to purchase this rare late 18th century bracket clock by Thomas Berry of Ormskirk, 2ft 7in by 17in (79 x 43cm).

Sold at Sotheby’s, London sale (October 12-13) for £6500 was a rare example of a printed version of one of the letters exchanged by Napoleon and the Sherif of Mekkah, Ghalib ibn Musa’id, at the time of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798-99.

PICASSO’S Blue Period canvas Femme aux bras croisés set a world record for the artist at auction on November 8.

A trio of international experts appointed by a Paris court have concluded that it may be technically possible to prevent Web browsers from consulting sites based in another country, but that the method envisaged is not fully reliable.

UK: Doubt still hangs over the future of goods consigned to troubled west London auctioneers Academy of Ealing.

UK: The Voyage of H.M.S Beagle is a summary of fauna discovered by Charles Darwin on his travels through the Southern Hemisphere from 1831-6, and became crucial to the formulation of his brutal creed: “survival of the fittest”.

EXPERT evidence on the Kent County Council Bill will go into select committee session for an unexpected third week on Tuesday, November 7 as almost every clause in the proposed Bill is closely examined.

UK: ANTIQUES Portfolio, the dotcom company which had tied in its future with the now defunct Gavelnet, has itself filed for insolvency

FRANCE: A Paris court has granted a temporary injunction placing a Cézanne painting currently on show at a city museum under legal supervision pending an inquiry into its ownership.

As demonstration that one should always be alert outside one’s narrow field, it is worth citing the Civil War piece, pictured, that was offered in a Jewellery sale at Phillips London on October 3.

ANTHONY Browne, chairman of the British Art Federation, has just led a delegation of art dealers to Strasbourg to lobby the European Parliament further on the artists’ resale levy, droit de suite.

The most startling result produced by the Allan Cuthbertson sale, Bonhams, London 3-4 October was an eight times estimate bid of £34,000 from Andrew Edmonds for a five volume set of The Caricature Magazine, or Mirror of Mirth.

UK: The most comprehensive and perhaps the finest collection of early silver spoons to appear on the market since the 1960s went under the hammer at Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury last Wednesday (October 25).

LONDON: Highlight of the German and Austrian series from the Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection was Egon Schiele’s oil on canvas Portrait of the Art Dealer Guido Arnot, 4ft 7in x 3ft 7in (1.40 x 1.09m), signed and dated 1918 which sold at Sotheby’s in London for £6.5m (plus premium), more than twice its top estimate.

The market for 20th century German art proved dramatically selective last week when the much-promoted Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection came under the hammer at Sotheby’s on the evening of October 18.

In these days of raging prices for anything remotely decorative in the world of antiques, it is not often that you find something early, unusual and pleasing to the eye for little more than £500.

SIX claimants have refiled a case against online sales giant EBay that, if successful, could deal a fatal blow to the company’s global status and have huge implications for Internet sales worldwide.

THE Art-Law Centre of Switzerland is holding an international symposium, entitled Claims for the Restitution of Looted Art, at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva on November 10.

UK: The unexpected crowd puller at Lyon & Turnbull’s 509-lot sale on October 8 was this Wanli period (1573-1619) Chinese blue and white ewer estimated at £400-500