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.
The king of terror, Nostradamus’s interpreters suggested, was the antichrist. Others argued that, because Angolmois is a (near) anagram of Mongolais, the 16th-century French term for Mongolians, invasion of Europe from the east was imminent – though whether by Russians or tooled-up descendants of Genghis Khan was uncertain. Nostradamus expert Prof Alexander Tollman was so worried he retreated to
