The recent auction of a famous photo of Albert Einstein (the one where he is sticking out his tongue from 1951) reminds me of the apocryphal tale of his lecture tour of the US on Relativity. Throughout the tour the great scientific genius employed the same chauffeur, who would sit at the back of the lecture hall each night waiting for his employer to finish before driving him back to his hotel.

After a while, the chauffeur told Einstein that he had heard the lecture so many times he believed he would be able to deliver it himself. Einstein decided to let him take up the challenge, knowing that their next stop was a place where he was not well known and so it was possible no one would guess that they had swapped roles.

Sure enough, on the night, the chauffeur took to the stage and completed the lecture without anyone being the wiser. Meanwhile Einstein took a quiet nap at the back of the lecture hall posing as the chauffeur.

However, just as the real chauffeur was leaving the stage, a research student asked him a very complex question to which he did not know the answer. Thinking quickly, he said: “The answer to that question is so simple that I am going to let my chauffeur answer it for me.” Now that’s genius.

This is an area of pheasant shoots, and while those ready to take aim will have to wait until October 1 for that, August 12 is the start of the Red Grouse season.

While blasting birds out of the sky has never been my passion, the paintings of game birds by Archibald Thorburn are. His depictions of pheasant, grouse and ptarmigan are pre-eminent among British bird painters of the past century, as prices at auction will confirm. A decent watercolour of any of these birds in a moorland setting will have no problem encouraging bids up to the £25,000 mark.

Collectors have long taken aim at Thorburn but I suppose he really came into his own when the popularity of shooting spread from the landed gentry to commercial shoots in the 1980s. Born the son of a miniaturist painter who worked for Queen Victoria near Edinburgh in 1860, Thorburn had little to no formal training except for a brief stint at art school in St John’s Wood. What really set him on the road to his life’s work was a stroke of luck. In 1887 when the Dutch artist J.G. Keulemans fell ill, Thorburn took over the commission from Lord Lilford of Northampton to complete the illustrations for the seven-volume Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. By the time he finished his career had taken flight.

This week I want to return to the tragedy of the First World War because July 31 marked the centenary of the beginning of the Battle of Passchandaele.

Also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, it lasted just over three months and remains one of the most controversial offensives of the entire conflict, partially because British leaders could not agree on whether it was the right thing to do strategically and partially because the dire weather as the battle progressed made the already horrifying and miserable life in the trenches all the more unbearable. The Germans lost 217,000 troops, while the allied forces of British, French, Belgian, Canadian, Australian, Indian and South African suffered around 245,000 dead and wounded between them.

Lloyd George, the prime minister, deemed it “one of the greatest disasters of the war”. Others had wanted Field Marshall Haig to hold back until the Americans arrived at the front. The poet Siegfried Sasson wrote : “I died in Hell. They called it Passchendaele.”

For me, though, its legacy includes a wonderful reminder about how man can create something powerful and positive out of the worst experience. That reminder is the art by the likes of Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson and others, showing shell bursts, the wounded and suffering of those at the front in the battle – art that continues to command high prices at auction today, and acts as a warning to us about what we must avoid in future.

This time of year is what the media call the Silly Season, traditionally a period when news is thin on the ground and reporters will file copy on bizarre tales that wouldn’t normally make it into print. They do this because many newspapers and news websites are working on skeleton staff during the holidays and are under more pressure to fill the space available. It’s an ideal time to look out for articles on the weird and wonderful things that have sold at auction.

I recently trawled through the archives with this in mind and here are a few of things I came up with:

• William Shatner’s kidney stone. That’s right, 11 years ago the Starship Enterprise’s former Captain Kirk raised $25,000 for charity with this tasteless offering.
• A grandmother. Ten-year-old Zoe Pemberton put her grandma, Marion Goodall, up for auction on eBay in 2010. The site shut the sale down when the price reached £20,000.
• Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. After JFK’s assassin was exhumed in 1981 to check that a body double had not be been buried in his place, he was reburied in a new coffin. The original one fetched nearly $90,000.
• New Zealand. In 2006 an Australian man set a starting pricing of one Australian cent for the country. eBay also closed down this sale… when bidding reached Aus$3000.