Silver & Silver-plated items

A claret jug combining the talents of Stevens & Williams of Stourbridge in the UK and US firm Duhme & Co from Cincinnati crushed its $2000-3000 guide to hammer for $35,000 (£25,890).

It’s not often that a group of medals offered at auction includes two that were in fact officially revoked. However, a lot that appeared at an East Yorkshire auction house on June 27 reflected a notorious tale of colonial corruption.

Auctions like this don’t come along often these days.

Bust once thought to be 18th century reassessed as 1st century AD after auction house’s research

The latest Homes & Interiors sale at Sworders included an extraordinary and highly personal relic from the Waterloo battlefield: a silver-mounted inkwell made from the ear of a war horse.

A fine example of the Libertas Americana silver medal is estimated to fetch between £50,000-80,000 at Anderson & Garland’s Fine Silver and Objects of Vertu auction in Newcastle on July 22.

A substantial collection of 18th and 19th century Cape silver, made by European silversmiths practising in South Africa, is coming for sale at Strauss & Co in Johannesberg.

Stock of retiring dealer offered at auction includes items with fascinating backgrounds

The workers who were given the task in 1869 of demolishing a medieval patrician house in the Bavarian city of Regensburg found much more than they had expected.

A handsome pair of Regency period Egyptian Revival silver candlesticks with a Jane Austen connection sold well above hopes at Lacy Scott & Knight in Bury St Edmunds.

Oxfordshire sale includes minaudière designed as an alternative to traditional handbags - plus a more conventional ‘French Jazz Age’ evening bag

In 1962, Lord John Hope, the Minister of Works in the Macmillan government commissioned David Mellor (1930-2009) to ‘supply silver you have designed to every British embassy in the world’.

Pictured below are three fine silver and enamel cigarette cases dating from the turn of the 20th century sold at auction in recent weeks.

The popular dealer amassed an impressive array of items assayed in the city

From the late 18th century, Birmingham was the centre for the making of ‘toys’ – small decorative objects including boxes, nutmeg graters, buckles, caddy spoons, vinaigrettes and rattles, fashioned from silver.

The many models of anthropomorphic primates that proliferated British decorative arts in the 1860s typically reference Charles Darwin’s provocative and often lampooned 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection', first published in 1859.