When ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ women actually dropped dead

No one watches Antiques Roadshow for the antiques. Instead we’re hanging on the punter’s reaction to his three-grand valuation. ‘It was very precious to Aunt Mabel; we’d never dream of selling it,’ says the mouth. ‘Fortnight in Barbados,’ say the eyes.

The Antiques Magpie by the Roadshow’s Marc Allum exhibits the same preference for stories over objects. Allum tells us that ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ comes from Victorian dresses (as in Winterhalter’s painting above) whose green dye contained arsenic, and that French forks have their crests on the back because they were laid face down on the table.

One auction house used to attribute unknown Dutch paintings to ‘Hertz van Rentall’, while the key to the Titanic’s binocular cabinet was accidentally left ashore (would they have spotted the iceberg?). Saucy-postcard merchant Donald McGill was fined under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. The gems in an item of ‘acrostic’ jewellery spell out a word: for instance, one containing jacinth, amethyst, diamond, opal, ruby and emerald gives ‘j’adore’. Look closely at some Victorian family photographs and you’ll see they were taken as records of a recently deceased child, posed as though asleep.

The spookiest revelation, however, is that Lord Ashcroft has collected more than a tenth of all the Victoria Crosses ever awarded. What’s he trying to prove?