The Winter Fine Art and Antiques fair, which kicks off on Monday at London's Olympia, offers everything from English furniture to Russian icons. The more traditional of the two Olympia fairs, this event will be closely watched to see whether, in the current climate, buyers are tempted back to the safer haven of antiques, and if the newly strengthened dollar may encourage back the American decorators who used to be the fair's mainstay. On offer is just the sort of quirky thing they come to find - a Japanese fireman's helmet, looking more like a Star Wars puppet. Marilyn Garrow is showing an example dating from about 1900, priced at £395 (pictured). Another unusual offering is a pottery dog, made in Scotland in the mid-19th century (£4,500, with John Howard).

Christie's recent sale of modern western and middle eastern art in Dubai produced a solid outcome, with 70 per cent of the lots finding buyers. However, as in other parts of today's art market, these results were achieved by lowering reserves: a work by the popular Iranian Parviz Tanavoli, "Poet in Love" (1997-2007), sold for $242,500, half its low estimate. Meanwhile, orientalist paintings - detailed Victorian depictions of bazaars, harems, nubile odalisques - are having a tough time at auction. This is an unpredictable market, which depends on a few major buyers from Turkey and the Middle East (Sheikh Hassan Al Thani of Qatar owns 600 such works). Sotheby's showed some orientalist paintings to Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai before selling them in New York and Paris last month, but results were poor: only half the offerings found buyers, although Mohammad Ehsai's "Homage to the Moon" (pictured) made £313,250. The firm is including a group of these works in its European paintings sale in London on November 12; among them Italo Nunes Vais's "In the Hamam" (est. £15,000-£20,000) and Antonio Gargiullo's "In the Harem" (est. £6,000-£8,000). "With restrictions on representation in Islamic countries in the 19th century, museums who want to show daily life are turning to these paintings," says Sotheby's specialist Claude Piening. "Some are rather imaginative, but others are accurate - John Frederick Lewis, for example, spent 10 years in Cairo and immersed himself in the culture."