Simon Winder's trilogy – Germania, Danubia and now Lotharingia – is rather remarkable. A synthesis of a couple of thousand years of European history produced over little more than a decade by a writer with a full-time job in publishing (he is an editorial bigwig at Penguin) who is not a professional historian and takes every opportunity in his self-deprecating narrative to tell us that his facility for languages is non-existent. It is an insane undertaking, yet somehow he has got away with it and come to the end of his “personal history” largely unscathed.
He has managed it because, for all the self-mockery, he has a serious purpose. In Germania, he explores the idea of German-ness that culminated in the deadly fantasies of the Nazis. Danubia examines how the dysfunctional Habsburg family could hold together a sprawling empire of competing national groupings for almost half a millennium. And Lotharingiatells the story of that part of Europe – what is now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lorraine in northern France and most of northern Germany west of the Rhine – that has been labelled the “cockpit”, so central has it been to Franco-German rivalry and the course of the continent's history.
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