A rifle from the personal armoury of Tipu Sultan sold for £60,000 in Oxfordshire last week.

Three bona fide country house clearances are on the horizon – one conducted by Duke’s of Dorchester following ‘on the premises’ viewing and two others offered in quick succession by Dreweatts at Donnington Priory.

Weekly clearance sales are increasingly being replaced by newly branded formats as auction houses are responding to fresh consumer trends.

Surprise bid highlights demand for vintage Rolex accessories at auction.

A 9th century gilt bronze figure bought at a Missouri garage sale and later appraised on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow was the toast of the New York Asia Week auctions.

London Judaica dealer Joseph Landau travelled to Sworders in Stansted Moutfitchet on March 13 with the sole purpose of buying a pencil, charcoal and white chalk drawing Carrying the Torah by Simeon Solomon (1840-1905).

A group of railway posters, found in a cellar and almost discarded by their owner, sold for more than £5000 at the House and Garden sale at Mallams in Abingdon.

Wiltshire auction house Henry Aldridge & Son is offering, across a series of sales, a collection of more than 450 corkscrews. The vendor, buying for more than 40 years and particularly acquisitive at the peak of the market in the 1990s, owned some great rarities with several early models already topping five figures.

Pouring wine at the table from a standardised machine-made bottle is a relatively new custom. For centuries before the Victorian era, wine was typically bought and stored in the barrel and decanted into bottles or jugs only before use at the table.

Three models from an English porcelain factory about which almost nothing is known surfaced for sale in East Sussex last week.