The idea for Nostradamus: The Good News came from my publisher, Duncan Baird. Reading through the work of previous commentators, it had occurred to him that Nostradamus’s name appeared synonymous with doom, gloom, and visions of the Apocalypse. He wondered whether there mightn’t be a little sunlight hidden somewhere deep amongst the Stygian depths. I told him there was, and so we devised a book that would highlight only the more optimistic quatrains that Nostradamus had written. It made for a pleasant change in my precious work schedule! To my immense surprise, I discovered that Nostradamus was a great deal more positive than people give him credit for, and that there was at the very least a good book’s worth of Good News quatrains to be teased out from amongst the horrors and intimations of Armageddon and the End Of Days that recidivist Jonahs and vainglorious commentators have always been so keen to associate with his work.

Good news is, by its very nature, subjective – somebody’s good news is, after all, frequently only somebody else’s worst nightmare. I tried to get around this fact by choosing only those quatrains that appeared to offer, for the most part at least, generalised good news. But that was not always possible. My second line of defence, therefore, was to choose quatrains that suggested that the ‘goodies’ (or at the very least the ‘ethically responsible’) would be the eventual winners. I took this line because it was Nostradamus’s most fundamental belief that if the world could only see into the future, it would wish to alter it benevolently. His prophecies might be construed, therefore, as in part an attempt to communicate across the intervening ages with the world to come, and in further part to cause that world to change itself before it is too late to the advantage of all humanity. As a direct consequence it became inevitable that Nostradamus: The Good News would isolate only those prophecies which suggested such a possibility of creative change, allowing the prophecies, and Nostradamus himself, to be shown, for the first time ever, in an entirely fresh and forward-looking light. These are the prophecies that did – and indeed could – alter the world for the better, and their encapsulation inside one book is pretty much unique.