You name it, the 16th-century prophet supposedly foresaw it – right down to the death of Elizabeth II, which has made a bestseller of a book interpreting his cryptic verses. It’s time to sift facts from fantasy …
There is good news and bad news. The good news is that, as you may have noticed, the world didn’t end on 4 July 1999. Hence the headline in the Guardian on Monday 5 July 1999: “Nostradamus wrong (please ignore if the world ended yesterday).”
Writing 450 years earlier, the French astrologer seemed to have predicted the end in, for him, unusually date-specific terms: “The year one thousand nine ninety-nine seven month / From the sky shall come a great King of terror / [Shall be] revived the great King of Angolmois. Before and after, Mars [shall] reign as chance will have it.”
