The eye-popping amounts people pay

I am looking at a picture of a hat. A 214-year-old hat. It is a natty black bicorne, made of felt, lined with satin, and it once sat on Napoleon Bonaparte's big little head. Even more impressive than this relic of war, autocracy, hubris and defeat, is its price tag. It was sold last week for £1.5 million. Yes, someone - a Korean poultry mogul - was willing to shell out a mill and a half for a hat.

Napoleon values remain buoyant, it seems. Back in the 1990s, you could have bought a lock of his hair for a mere £5,700, or a pair of his socks, as worn on St Helena, for a mere £2,990. At the Fontainebleau sale, a couple of his hair clippings went for nearly £10,000 each, bought by a watchmaker who intends installing a hair each in special Napoleonic timepieces, while his socks now fetch similar sums.

If Adolf Hitler is more your thing, then you would naturally wish to own a couple of pistols with which he may (or may not) have committed suicide. They were offered for sale, back in 1998, for $3 million. I'm not sure if anyone bought them, but a pair of the Führer's binoculars went for £28,125 in 1999, and the following year his hair was being sold at £700 per hair. A snip at the price.

President Kennedy is another world figure whose relics command eye-popping amounts. His bag of golf clubs sold for $772,500 in 1996, a pair of his boxer shorts for $5,000 in 2003, and his old bomber jacket for $570,000 in 2013. A 26-second home movie that showed his assassination was bought by the US government for $16 million (the owner had demanded $30 million). Meanwhile, the revolver used by Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald fetched $220,000, with the new owner selling bullets fired from the gun at $1,400 a time. Yes, there are people out there willing to pay more than a thousand bucks for a spent bullet.

Winston Churchill's half-smoked cigars usually fetch at least £1,000 (there are plenty of them around); one dating from 1941 sold in 2010 for £4,500. A homburg hat of his sold for £6,600 in 1991. But a top hat once worn by Franklin D Roosevelt sold in Boston just a couple of months ago for £23,000, while Abraham Lincoln's glasses made £14,000. The Duke of Windsor's hankies made $1,000 each in 1998; one of Lady Thatcher's cast-off handbags fetched £100,000 in 2000.

Dead pop stars command equally stratospheric sums. A lock of John Lennon's hair fetched £24,000 in 2007 at an auction in Worthing, while a pair of his tinted 'granny' specs were valued the same year at £1 million, even though their lenses were missing. The following year, a guitar that had been incinerated on stage by Jimi Hendrix, and which had languished for 40 years in a Hove garage, sold for £280,000. Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' jacket sold in 2011 for $1.8 million, one of his encrusted gloves for $330,000, and his fedora hat (these hats!) for $16,250. A pair of Elvis Presley's blue suede shoes (size 10) sold in 2013 for £53,000.

All this merely goes to show how in our celebrity-obsessed world anything formerly touched by a star becomes itself galactically super-valued.

And incidentally, that Napoleonic hat was far from unique - which is why it went to Mr Kim Hong-Kuk rather than a French museum. All the museums already have his hats, thank you. There are about 20 of Napoleon's hats still around (out of 120 he originally owned). That amounts to a small fortune's worth of old hats.