Rarely does a ‘working’ diamond tiara come up for sale, so interest sky-rocketed when a tiara worn by Virginia Fortune Ryan Ogilvy – Dowager Countess of Airlie and Lady of the Bedchamber to the late Q

It’s out with winter blues and in with the blossoming prunus, unless it happens to be English pottery. Lucien de Guise finds out what Coalport brought to the tableware

Francesca Tancini Walter Crane Books in colour 856pp (two volumes). Yale University Press. £250 (US $325). “Nothing is dearer to the heart of a commercial age than a label”, Walter Crane declared towa

Josiah Wedgwood’s creative spirit transformed British pottery, and his pursuit of beauty and quality still shapes generations of potters today

Amateur botanist John Bradby Blake and his collaborators never completed their illustrated record of Chinese flora, but they still stoked Britain’s passion for the Asian country’s plants

The sale of a Fabergé imperial egg and a 15th-century triptych made headlines last year, but one of the most powerful pieces was a painting by Richard Parkes Bonington showing what he could have become, had he not died so young