US

The name of the film Green Book which won the Oscar for best picture in February was based on a motoring handbook aimed to guide African-American travellers away from hazardous areas in the pre-civil rights US.

Two market-fresh marble busts of 18th century luminaries by a famous French sculptor with a detailed historic provenance and very attractively pitched estimates were propelled to multi-estimate prices totalling $1.25m at a US auction last week.

Christie’s is to sell a remarkable collection of engraved gems from the Classical world, formerly in the Sangiorgi collection, in New York.

Beatlemania is coming to Liverpool. Well, it never went away, but this fresh wave of interest in the ever-popular Fab Four is in the form of an annual auction held by an American saleroom that is now to be held on Merseyside.

A recently-discovered early Coca-Cola bottle, a 1915 prototype of the design still used today, will be offered for sale next month with an auction estimate of $100,000-$150,000.

A Chinese gilt bronze figure bought at a garage sale and appraised on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow sold yesterday in New York for $1.7m (£1.3m) – around 21 times its upper estimate and more than 17,000 times its original purchase price.

John Pye Auctions will expand its Nottingham headquarters with two new salerooms – taking its total to nine.

The art market focus in the Big Apple at the moment is on Asian works as Manhattan’s galleries and major auction houses stage the latest edition of ‘Asia Week New York’.

Sotheby’s is to offer what it deems “the most important work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s celebrated career” as part of the Impressionist & Modern art evening sale in New York on May 14.

A US court claim challenging a 2014 New York law banning the sale of antique ivory by the Art and Antique Dealers League of America and the National Art and Antique Dealers Association of America has been reinstated due to amendments made to the case.

Sotheby’s held its very first auction on March 11, 1744, and today it is celebrating this 275-year milestone with the opening of an exhibition detailing its history in pictures.

Letters from Princess Diana written in the late 1980s and early 90s to a leading fashion magazine editor are coming to auction in New York.