Detective fiction, whether in print or on the screen, is possibly the most popular fiction of all. Think of everything from Agatha Christie to Line of Duty and you get the picture. Like crossword puzzles and treasure hunts, they challenge while entertaining, allowing the reader/viewer to exercise their “leetle grey cells”, as Hercule Poirot would say, as they try to guess whodunnit, as well as how and why, before the denouement reveals all.

In some ways, cataloguing items for auction present the specialist with the same challenge and excitement. The mystery can range from what an item is – we have had a few of those – to who originally owned it and where it came from.

If you consider that the value of an object can be heavily influenced by its past associations, finding out as such as you can becomes a vital task, especially if you are thinking of putting your own possessions up for auction.

In recent years, discovery stories that have made the headlines have often involved an old vase or plate that turns out to be an ancient Chinese rarity worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.

One of my favourite stories involved the sale of a piano. Bought by the niece of the woman who had previously owned it for just $25, she discovered that one of the pedals kept sticking. On having it repaired, she found that what was causing the problem was a secret stash of 100 antique baseball cards, which appeared to have been concealed for 80 years – probably hidden by one of the previous owner’s children.

Among the cards was a real rarity of the great Babe Ruth. That card alone later sold for $130,000.

So keep your eyes peeled and get your magnifying glass out.

The most expensive sold at auction for over $6.5 million; around one trillion are taken every day thanks to the ubiquity of the Smart phone; nearly all of us have taken them and own them. Few things are familiar to the average person than the photograph.

They are windows on the past, and where they have been faithfully reproduced rather than tampered with, provide us with the earliest unfettered and unfiltered clues to how we once lived.

When it comes to collecting, I can’t think of another discipline that it is as accessible or fascinating to the masses.

Vernacular or street photography has long been popular, never more so since then discovery of the extraordinary archive left by the unknown Vivian Maier (1926-2009), an American nanny who pursued a secret career as a street photographer for 40 years and whose work can now sell for thousands. From Victorian cartes de visites to anonymous everyday subjects that sell on eBay for a few pounds, this is a craze that keeps growing and keeps on giving.

So it is with some excitement that original works by the father of modern photography Sir William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) come to auction at Sotheby’s in April.

Featuring people, objects and places, including his celebrated home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the images date back to the early 1840s and include one of Lady Elisabeth Feilding c.1841, who was born in 1773, three years before the American Revolution.

Photographs bring local history alive. Precious relics, they create a unique connection that never existed before Fox Talbot and his fellow pioneers worked out how to fix those images in permanent form.

If you’ve ever wondered how much money is spent on art, antiques and collectables around the world each year, we have just been told: $50 billion. That may sound a lot, but to put that in perspective, the annual spend of the entire global art market is less than the market capitalisation value of all top 16 companies in the FTSE 100.

The value of the annual global art market has risen to almost $68 billion before, but as with nearly all other forms of commerce, the pandemic has taken its toll. Nonetheless, as this column has noted in recent months, art and antiques auctions have entered a booming new era thanks to the rapid acceleration of adoption of online sales.

The $50 billion figure was announced in mid-March by Arts Economics, the research company behind the eagerly anticipated Art Basel report, the Rolls Royce annual assessment of the art market and what is happening to it.

One of the report’s headline claims that online-only sales at auction doubled in the past year. Another was that although UK sales as a whole fell by 22% to $9.9 billion, it still held on to its top-three spot after the US and China as the world’s most important market for art and antiques.

It’s reassuring to know that even in troubled times, the knowledge, skill and expertise of British art market professionals still shines through.

It’s tough time to be a politician wherever you are, what with the pandemic, increasingly polarised views and the perils of social media. Two recent and not altogether unconnected events remind me that political legacies can defy early reputations. As Churchill’s personal brandy glass and monogrammed slippers sold for a combined premium-inclusive £60,000 at auction the other day, the almost mythical status of our greatest ever wartime leader was set against the rather less generous views of Chips Channon, celebrated diarist of the 1920s and ’30s, whose journals have been republished in unredacted form for the first time.

Channon, a brilliant writer of sometimes dubious views – he thought Hitler marvellous and Churchill the most dangerous man in Europe – was an unparalleled observer of his times in terms of wit yet was almost invariably wrong about public figures, events and how everything would turn out. His career as an MP was certainly overshadowed by his writing, and a good thing too.

How different was the experience of the nation’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, from the frenetic lives of 20^th century incumbents of that role. Walpole, who took office exactly 300 years ago on April 3, enjoyed an uninterrupted term in office of over 20 years – still the longest ministry of any PM. He is generally seen as one of the best political leaders we have ever had and navigated a careful course of moderation and tolerance to establish political and social stability. How different from the bearpit Commons that was to follow.