£ 3.6 million

At Sotheby’s London saleroom in July, what the auction house called a “unique and highly important” yellow- gold pocket watch by the great 20th and 21st- century English watchmaker George Daniels sold for almost four times its high estimate. Featuring a double- wheel escapement, mean- solar and sidereal time, annual calendar, age and phase of moon and equation of time indicators, this Space Traveller watch, which was completed in 1982, is not only considered Daniels’s masterpiece, but is also one of only 27 timepieces that he completed in his lifetime.