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DURRANTS Auction Rooms have issued an alert about a man claiming to be an antiques dealer from Belgium, who has recently bounced a cheque for nearly £3500 at their rooms.

BRINGING out the bidders in Banbury, this Indian Mughal carved ivory khandjar handle sold for £24,000 at Holloways' latest sale.

THE readjustment taking place at the top end of the contemporary and modern art market was once again in evidence at the latest flagship London auction series.

WHILE £50m was finally raised in February to keep the Duke of Sutherland's Titian painting Diana and Actaeon in the UK, an attempt to raise a further £50m by 2012 for the Duke's Diana and Callisto is already underway.

THE Art Fund have appointed Dr Stephen Deuchar, currently the director of Tate Britain and chairman of the 2009 Turner Prize, as its new director, with effect from January 4 2010.

ALBERT Richard Smith was obsessed from childhood with the idea that he might one day climb Mont Blanc. There were false starts and setbacks, financial and social, but in 1851 he finally got to stand on the peak of his dreams and spent the next few years building a small fortune on the strength of that achievement.

A DOZEN telephone bidders competed for a remarkable cache of primary provenanced Cotswolds School furniture offered by Duke's in Dorchester on June 18.

WELL-KNOWN silver dealer Nicholas Shaw is to leave the trade to become the new head of department at Bonhams. Following more than two decades working as a dealer, he begins work as an auctioneer in September.

HUDDERSFIELD Town may not feature on Sky Sports as much as Manchester United nowadays, but back in the mid-1920s it was the Terriers rather than the Red Devils who were the team to watch.

THE English Ceramic Circle’s annual loan exhibition marks the launch of a major research project to record dated and documentary English pottery and porcelain on their website.

CLIVE Stewart-Lockhart of Dreweatts handed over the chairmanship of the Society of Fine Art Auctioneers to Paul Viney of Woolley & Wallis at the Society’s biennial dinner at the Royal Thames Yacht Club in London last week.

THE important 17th century ivory barometer stolen from the Fairfax House Museum in York has been recovered and is back on display in the museum.

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into the softening Martinware market, along comes a £26,000 spoon-warmer.

THE campaign to persuade the government to extend business support to the antiques industry has set out in detail exactly what it wants to achieve.

THIS mysterious liveried Austin A40 Dinky van made for the Spanish company Omnisport sold for £6400 on the phone to a British collector at Wallis & Wallis in Lewes, East Sussex on June 8.

SOTHEBY’S New York hold the W. Graham Arader sale on June 19, offering 204 lots from the well-known American prints and maps specialist.

ALTHOUGH this summer’s Russian art auctions in London failed to bring the gold rush of previous years, there was some relief in the salerooms that demand did not sink even further.

Toovey’s have announced an increase in their buyer’s premium to 22.5% plus VAT. They cite rising running costs as the chief cause for the increase, which comes into effect on June 16-19.

WHEN John Harrison set about solving the problem of how to measure longitude, the name Association would have held a special resonance for him.

WHEN a market softens, it is often best to return to first principles – the core values of condition, market freshness and pricing that can be overlooked when an area of collecting really ‘takes off’.