The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONBefore writing about the life, times and predictions of Nostradamus, I feel I must write about the extraordinary effect he and his works have had upon my personal life. Some are almost beyond belief.Certainly it was Nostradamus who turned my ideas toward making writing my career. I first came across a book of the Prophecies at Oxford, when I was about nineteen. At that time I was reading medieval Romance Languages, of which Ancien Provençal was one of the most important. I had ordered some set book in the Taylorianthe linguist's equivalent of the Bodleian Libraryand in its stead I received the 1568 edition of Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus. While waiting for the correct book to arrive, I idled through the Prophéties. It was fascinating. Names such as Hitler, Napoleon, Franco, Pasteur sprang to the eye. There were many dates too, but the only one that stuck in my mind was 1666, "when the city of London would be destroyed by fire." Not easy to forget, even for someone who is not an historian.One night a great friend, who was then an editor on Nova magazine, sadly now long defunct, came to dinner with some friends. At some point I mentioned Nostradamus, this extraordinary prophet, to her. She was interested and I wrote a long article for the magazine, to which they added an amazing collage of pictures of the people I had mendoned.The article was an enormous success, voted by Nova readers as tying with one other as the best in the magazine that year. From that, and thanks to a clever publisher brother-in-law, Putnam's of New York commissioned a book upon Nostradamus. I do not know to this day how I managed to complete it.