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The highlight of the recent Decorative Art and Design sale conducted by Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchet was this Wedgwood Fairyland lustre malfrey pot and cover designed by Daisy Makeig-Jones (1881-1945).

The Design Museum has made its first significant fashion acquisition thanks to a donation by Jill Ritblat through the Art Fund.

An important private collection of Beatrix Potter books, manuscripts, artwork, photographs, figurines and collectables is being offered for sale at Bloomsbury Auctions on February 27.

The Modern and Contemporary art collection accumulated over a 60-year period by singer Andy Williams will be sold at auction later this year.

A 19th/early 20th century totem pole brightly painted and carved with a beaver, a bear, a whale and a surmounted eagle with outspread wings is to go under the hammer at Duke’s of Dorchester in Dorset on February 14.

The latest sales of Impressionist and Modern art in London posted a strong overall performance as private buyers showed a growing appetite for works by major names.

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).