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Direct competitors to Bonhams Honiton, in an area of the South West that is hardly brimming with quality goods, auctioneer Richard Connor and his team nevertheless put together a respectable offering of brown furniture and paintings at the Honiton Galleries, where the one item of rarity among the silver was this Irish dish ring of above average quality by Edmond Johnson, Dublin 1863, measuring 8in (20cm) diameter, which attracted an above-estimate bid of £2200.

TOP London specialist in English pottery Jonathan Horne exhibits at major fairs in London and New York and consistently comes up with top-of-the range stock, which he generally sells very well indeed.

MORE Deco news, this time from Wimbledon organiser Paola Francia-Gardiner who as P&A Antiques is seeing a deal of success with her West London decorative events.

The now-defunct firm of Hedges & Butler (est.1667) was one of the oldest wine merchants in England, originally based by the Thames on a site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. The name of the company has now disappeared, but what its own publicity described as “our very interesting collection of old Viniana” provided an eye-catching highlight for Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) otherwise fairly routine mixed sale of art and antiques in Knowle.

Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius, by Colin Ford published by National Portrait Gallery Publications. ISBN 1855145065 £40hb

If, as a recent opinion poll has suggested, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest-ever Briton, and Mouton-Rothschild’s 1945 vintage is, as Michael Broadbent described it in his Great Vintage Wine Book, “a Churchill of a wine”, is Mouton-Rothschild ’45, ergo, the Greatest Ever Wine?

The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made The Future by Jenny Uglow, published by Faber & Faber. ISBN 0571196470 £25 hb