Auctions

Morphets (20% buyer’s premium) of Harrogate sold a Mouseman bureau for a tub-thumping £36,000 on April 15.

Sold for $150,000 (£109,490), some 10 times the low estimate, was a lot comprising 11 Xeroxed pages that constitute a pre-publication draft of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ of 1963.

On May 18 Paris auction firm Tessier Sarrou is selling the first part of a collection of Japanese swords.

ATG’s pick of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com, including both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

A Mitchells (22% buyer’s premium) sale included selected contents from Greystoke Castle near Penrith – home to the Howard family for over 500 years.

Our weekly listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

A portrait argued to be of author Emily Brontë is coming to auction this month.

This unmarked teapot and cover, offered by Dreweatts, dates from the first decade of porcelain production at the Chelsea factory.

The sale at Roseberys London on May 18 includes this gold and silver-inlaid bronze tapir-form zun dated to the Yuan or early Ming period.

Among the highlights of the Asian Art auction at Koller on June 2 is this ink and colour scroll painting 'Sunrise at Mount Tai' by Li Keran (1907-89).

London auction offered wide array including famous Federalist American collection of essays

Chiswick Auctions conducts two sales on June 1-2: the usual Asian Art sale, plus a themed sale called Chinese Art: 100 Stories.

Sotheby’s sale of Chinese art on May 12 includes this Qianlong mark and period celadon ground famille rose decorated bottle vase.

This 19th century thangka depicts the Buddhist goddess Tara seated in lalitasana on a lotus growing from a lake a pond, a padma in each hand.

A Victoria Cross group awarded to a British soldier who volunteered to carry a vital message to a stranded platoon at Mericourt in October 1918, in the knowledge that five of his comrades had already been in killed in turn making earlier attempts, sold for £200,000.

A work thought to be one of Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727-88) earliest attempts at oil painting as well as his earliest-known self-portrait was one of a number of lots drawing considerable attention at Cheffins.

A bronze sculpture of an ostrich catalogued as from the workshop of Mannerist sculptor Giambologna drew an extraordinary competition in Cambridge.