Auctions

This small 6in (15cm) object made of gourd, ivory and pierced tortoiseshell would have originally housed crickets in 18th century China.

An Egyptian sculpture of Isis became the most expensive lot ever sold at Christie’s South Kensington when it fetched £3.25m at their latest antiquities sale.

The Lennoxlove Amen glass, well-documented in Geoffrey B Seddon’s authoritative work ‘The Jacobites and their Drinking Glasses’, is to be offered for sale in Shropshire.

Setting an auction record for a motorcycle, this 1922 Brough Superior, known to all as ‘Old Bill’, sold for £260,000 last week.

It wasn’t too long ago that Newlyn School artists were ranked right up alongside the leading lights of the Modern British art market.

Mellors and Kirk of Nottingham included a watercolour by Walter Langley (1852-1922) in their fine art sale on September 20-21.

Ever popular in the saleroom, the artist Edward Seago (1910-1974) has a following at auction that few 20th century British painters can match.

In a marketplace seriously in need of entry-level collectors, the great majority of Royal Doulton character jugs and HN series figures are worth under £100 – and most of them less than £30 when sold without reserve at auction.

A local 90-year-old gentleman and his wife were in the room to watch his childhood toy sell for a small fortune at W. & H. Peacock’s recent ‘Memories of Childhood’ sale in Bedford.

It is doubtless the source of a little irritation, or perhaps amusement, to members of the men-only Flyfishers Club of Piccadilly that the two largest salmon ever caught with a rod and line in British waters were both landed by women.

Mallams’ Gentleman’s Library Sale in Oxford on October 31 will be the first to benefit from a new the-saleroom.com delivery service.

This 2ft 5in x 2ft ½in (75 x 62cm) bust length portrait drew the attention of a number of bidders with a particular interest in historical pictures when it appeared at auction in Dorchester.

The eagerly anticipated auction of Underground posters direct from the archives of London Transport Museum was a sell-out at Christie’s South Kensington earlier this month.

This large, scratch-built 5in gauge Great Western Railway locomotive is one of two being sold at Lawrences of Crewkerne on November 2, with both expected to realise £3000-4000.

A house visit in north Derbyshire unearthed a treasure trove, with every room cluttered with porcelain figures.

This first edition, first issue of ‘The Great Gatsby’ from 1922 is one of the star lots in a sale described by Bloomsbury Auctions as “one of the most important collections of modern first editions to come onto the market in the last ten years”.

Despite being called a ‘Black Forest’ carving, this late 19th century figure by Johann Huggler of Brienz, of a poacher with dead deer, gun and a dog at his feet, the base carved with rabbits and birds, was actually produced in Switzerland rather than Bavaria.

Edward S. Curtis’ monumental photographic study of ‘The North American Indian’ was one of the most expensive and ambitious undertakings in the history of book production, comprising 20 illustrated text volumes and 20 folios of larger photographic plates.

Although originally entered into one of the regular weekly sales held by Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet, this striking mid-century glass vessel was plucked from obscurity by a member of staff who recognised it as something worthy of further research.

This year’s Frieze week auction totals in London were largely consistent with 2011, but the much-publicised sale of Eric Clapton’s prize abstract by Gerhard Richter (b.1932) proved crucial in bolstering the overall figures.