What have you got on your wall? I thought about this last week when I heard of the sale of artworks that had been hanging on the wall of a Las Vegas hotel. They were not just any old daubs, mind you, but nine pictures and two ceramic artworks by arguably the most important artist of the 20^th century: Pablo Picasso.

Hung on the restaurant wall of the Bellagio Hotel, the artworks spanned more than 50 years of Picasso’s career, with the top price among them coming for the 1938 painting Woman in a Red-Orange Beret. Expected to fetch $20m-30m, it sold for a very encouraging $40.5m.

In fact, as a whole the consignment did rather better than hoped, totalling $110m.

That’s quite a wallful.

It reminded me, too, of the first great discovery on the Antiques Roadshow. Back in 1986, a couple in Barnstaple, Devon decided to show a painting that they had owned since 1930 to art expert Peter Nahum, one of the show’s specialists. They hadn’t thought it worth anything but were curious to find out more about it and, anyway, were taking their dog for a walk so thought they might as well drop in on the show which was filming in the town.

It transpired that it was the most important missing work by the Victorian artist Richard Dadd and dated to about 1845 – two years after he had killed his father in a mad frenzy. Titled The Halt in the Desert, it was painted while Dadd was detained in Broadmoor and shows a rather peaceful moonlit scene. The British Museum bought it for a large six-figure sum.

So now we know: a work of art can be worth far more once you destroy it. Well that’s true if you’re Banksy. Just a few weeks ago I mused on how much his ‘transformed picture’ Love is in the bin – previously Girl with Balloon – might make when it appeared at Sotheby’s on October 14. It had previously sold for £1m in 2018, and the moment the hammer fell, the canvas dropped through a shredder hidden in the bottom of the frame.

Shocking it may have been at the time, but it was a stunt that caught the art market’s attention, fascination and even admiration, turning the picture immediately into Banksy’s most famous / notorious artwork, and so also the most valuable of his paintings.

It remains the greatest irony that the artist who does more than any other to subvert the art market and its processes has proved himself yet again the ultimate master of the industry’s marketing machine.

In this context, while Sotheby’s estimate of £4-6 million might have looked a little punchy, it did not seem beyond the bounds of possibility. So what happened on the night? Forget the estimate; frenzied bidding took the painting to £18.5 million hammer, a record for any piece of Street art, sealing Banksy’s status at the top of the international art pantheon for living artists alongside the likes of David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Beeple and Jeff Koons.

Paul McCartney has no desire to write an autobiography, I understand. However, a new broadcast interview does provide further insights into the endlessly fascinating subject of The Beatles. Despite the long-held view that it was Macca who pulled the plug on the Fab Four – the result of his announcement during an interview at the beginning of the 1970s – he now reveals that all he was doing was finally letting slip what had been decided some time before. According to Sir Paul, it was John Lennon who called time on the band as he sought pastures new with Yoko Ono. The other bandmates, including McCartney, had wanted to carry on.

Setting the record straight provides some of the most newsworthy stories, and auctions are often the catalyst for this.

The latest example is the decision by Al Capone’s descendants to consign 174 personal items for auction. Ageing themselves, his grandchildren wish to divest themselves of these important artefacts, firstly so at least some of them can go to public institutions, secondly because they are concerned about wildfires near their homes and thirdly because it creates an opportunity for revising the public opinion of Chicago’s most notorious gangster.

A letter from Capone, written to his son while languishing in Alcatraz, shows his touching human side, argues his granddaughter. “These are not the words or ideas of a man who is a ruthless gangster. These are the words of a loving father,” she told The Guardian.

Maybe, but sadism and sentimentality in the same person are not mutually exclusive, as many a tyrant has shown. Capone may have been cuddly with some, but the Roaring Twenties Capo had a public reputation that was richly deserved.

What price a rickety old wooden bridge stretched across a small stream in a wood in the south east of England?

Around £60,000 if the auction estimate is accurate.

Surely you could buy a much better new one for a fraction of that sum?

Ah yes, but not one associated with such a dearly loved character as Winnie the Pooh – and certainly not one that could claim to be home to the legendary game of Pooh Sticks.

First described in A.A. Milne’s The House At Pooh Corner, the bridge could be found in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, near the author’s home.

Milne’s son, the model for Christopher Robin, played on it as a boy, as have generations of children since.

After countless thousands of had tramped across it, it was replaced with an iron bridge in 1999; now, 114 years after it was first constructed, the bridge has come up for auction.

So how to put a price on something so simply made and with such little intrinsic value, but whose associations catapult it into the collectables stratosphere?

Certainly, £60,000 for something so iconic does not appear unreasonable, but if a rich enough fan comes up against someone equally determined to secure it on the day, bidding could rise far beyond that figure.

The best way to price such an item is to look at other auction prices for major pieces linked to Milne and Pooh. The original Hundred Acre Wood map illustrated by E.H. Shepard sold for £430,000 in 2018, which makes the bridge’s estimate look a bit of a bargain.