UK

Distinctive steeple cups are scarce but an Elizabethan silver example came to market at a Somerset auction house

Bid to £1500 in a Norfolk sale was a 1930 first of The Savoy Cocktail Book.

A snuff box believed to have been gifted by Lord Nelson to his personal secretary during a dinner party attended by Emma Hamilton has been sold by Paul Fraser Collectables for £45,000.

After just three weeks of trading in July at their newly opened showroom in the Grade II-listed Corn Exchange in Tunbridge Wells, dealers Chrissie and John Masters of the Design Gallery have made brisk sales to new customers for their Art Deco pieces.

Demand for anything to do with Concorde is always high but a huge ‘museum quality’ model at Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) had an extra touch.

A silver sale at Woolley & Wallis (25/12% buyer’s premium) this summer included a selection of 24 snuff boxes from the Lion collection – as published in 'British Silver Boxes 1640-1840, The Lion Collection' (2015).

Pre-1950s Mary Fedden works are stylistically different to her later still-lifes and coastal subjects

The Petersfield Antiques Fair, which was scheduled to take place in Hampshire this September, has been called off.

What was billed as ‘the finest Matchbox collection to be auctioned in recent years’ was offered at Vectis (20% buyer’s premium) in the spring.

Such is the recent appeal of dolls’ house accessories that you do not even need the ‘house’ to put them in, it seems.

A live-steam Gauge 2 Midland Railway locomotive and tender was the top lot of Tennants’ (20% buyer’s premium) Toys, Models, Collectables and Sporting Sale.

Gold wedding rings belonging to poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have been bought by London jeweller Wartski.

After a year’s absence, Lady McAlpine’s four-day Thames Traditional Boat Festival is returning to Henley to run on Fawley Meadows from Friday to Monday, August 27-30.

Naomi Knight is back with her Sunday monthly and popular Bath Vintage & Antiques Markets with the next on August 29.

By the 1980s toy action figures were shrinking in size from GI Joe and Action Man proportions to the likes of Action Force and Star Wars.

A richly illuminated leaf from a late 15th century manuscript account of the life of St Catherine sold at a high-estimate £30,000 at Bloomsbury Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Keeley Rosendale of Discover Vintage is going all-out this autumn with her vintage home shows including the launch of one in London – her first in the south of England.

A tinplate model of the Alfa Romeo P2 sped past a £500-1000 estimate to take £4600 at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) auction in Dorchester.

Semley (22% buyer’s premium) earlier this summer sold this portrait of a young boy in profile by Maurice William Greiffenhagen (1862- 1931).

Armenian manuscript demolishes estimate to take six figures in London saleroom