Royal Mail will issue a miniature sheet of four stamps to celebrate the wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton.
It will be released on the Queen’s birthday, April 21, eight days before the wedding in Westminster Abbey on April 29.
The sheet features two different official engagement photographs of the couple by Princess Diana’s favourite photographer, Mario Testino, who is Peruvian.
The set of stamps to be issued on 12 April celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain’s most famous publicly funded theatre company.
It was in 1961 that famous director Sir Peter Hall founded the modern RSC as a permanent company, although earlier companies had been putting on seasons of plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare’s birthplace,
since 1879.
The six counter sheet stamps highlight six famous productions of Shakespeare plays, in most cases showing living actors who are eminently recognisable, albeit in character.
Characters in Britain’s best-loved fantasy stories, from ancient myths to modern best-sellers, are brought together in the Magical Realms set, to be issued on March 8.
The eight stamps illustrate two different enchanters from each of four series of stories, using a combination of film images and newly-commissioned illustrations.
Depicted in artwork by Howard Swindell are characters from medieval Arthurian legend, and from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld comic fantasy series, the first of which was published in 1983.
ABOVE: North Borneo 1894 5c black and vermilion, depicting the great argus pheasant
Mention British North Borneo to a Commonwealth collector and a number of responses are possible.
He may be beguiled by some of the most attractive and innovative issues to emerge at the end of the 19th century.
Equally, he may be confused by the seemingly endless array of cancelled-to-order remainders, printer’s waste, improbable perforations, spurious overprints and downright forgeries that exist.
The Nicaraguan Mt Momotombo 5c blue, which helped change the course of the Panama Canal
The first attempt to construct a navigable link between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, by the great French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1882, was stymied by landslides, malaria and yellow fever.
Together, these caused the deaths of almost 22,000 workers in Panama.
When the United States took up the challenge, its Canal Commission initially recommended a different route, through Nicaragua.
ABOVE: The top value had a magnificent portrait of King George V in the uniform of the Gordon Highlanders
The Falkland Islands had enjoyed its own stamps since the 1870s, but its most memorable set had to wait until 1933, when it marked the Centenary of British Administration in some style, with its first truly pictorial series and its first printed in two colours.
It was early in 1833 that Britain had sent two warships to expel South American insurgents from the islands, and when the 24-year-old Charles Darwin arrived on HMS Beagle that March he was greatly relieved to see the Union flag flying aloft.
But the situation remained tense, and a few months later rebellious gauchos would run amok, slaughtering eight islanders loyal to Britain.
The 5c rose-red was the workhorse of the Netherlands’ 1899-1923 Fur Collar definitive series, prepaying the inland postcard rate for a period of about 20 years
When a new series of definitives was needed by the Netherlands on the accession of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898, no Dutch artist managed to come up with a satisfactory portrait for the medium values.
So the French stamp designer Louis Mouchon, who had already done a lot of work for the printers, Enschedé, was invited to take up the challenge.
Partly as a result of this decision, the issue went far from smoothly.
In 1935 France laid down the first of four new Richelieu-class ‘super-dreadnought’ battleships, the most powerful it had ever built, in response to heightened international tension.
By January 1939, when the third vessel was commissioned, war had become a serious possibility and the mood of the nation was in need of a lift.
The Classic Locomotives of England miniature sheet, to be issued on February 1, is the first of a series of four highlighting the contribution made by steam engines to British industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Across the public railway network, and also in industrial locations such as factories, quarries and docks, locomotives of all shapes and sizes were the workhorses of the national economy until as recently as the 1960s, cared for by a vast army of drivers and firemen, engineers and mechanics.
Philip Parker of Royal Mail Stamps said: ‘For many people, the age of steam meant bright-liveried passenger locomotives, but in the background a huge number of other less glamorous steam machines were playing a massive role.
