Notebook

Asian buyers fuel record bids for glittering array of Hollywood star's diamonds and pearls

Linda Christian was a minor film actress whose best role was arguably in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1947), but she found fame and notoriety through her marriage to superstar Tyrone Power and her string of highly publicised affairs.

Richard Burton is to be recognised with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Even if you thought the internationally celebrated pageantry across London's streets last Friday counted as the most signficant wedding of recent times, Elizabeth Taylor's love affair with Richard Burton was surely "The Marriage of the Century", as this book's sub-title would have it. Their tumultuous, on-off love story, with the obligatory sad ending, cannot disappoint hard-core fans.

They will surely be the most glistening and glamorous sales of the season. With grieving for the movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who died on 23 March, barely over, Christie's has announced plans for a series of auctions featuring some of the late actress's belongings and, notably, her jewellery.

A collection of passionate letters from a young Elizabeth Taylor to her first love are to be sold at auction.

A disastrous headline was published on Tuesday. Above a report of poll findings about the Libya campaign appeared these words: "Seven out of 10 want British troops out and fear 'another Iraq'."

It is a fortune that even Cleopatra might have blushed at. Elizabeth Taylor, who immortalised the amorous pharaoh in the lavish 1963 movie of the same name, died leaving behind enough money to buy a pyramid or three of her own with personal riches estimated at up to $1bn (£625m), it was claimed yesterday.

Elizabeth Taylor was buried alongside her last ever love letter from Richard Burton.