Who is popular today?

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.” Continue reading...