Simon Winder’s trilogy – Germania, Danubia and now Lotharingia – is rather remarkable ... It is an insane undertaking, yet somehow he has got away with it and come to the end of his 'personal history' largely unscathed ... The dynastic twists and turns are at times hard to follow, and I could have done with better maps than Winder has supplied. A separate chronology might also have been handy, but perhaps “personal histories” frown on such academic apparatus. On the plus side, he is a jolly guide ... offering shafts of illumination that make the distant, knotty past come alive ... His reluctance to follow chronology and his liking for unexpected byways...mean you have to be on your toes and piece together the key developments yourself ... Winder overdoes the knockabout humour and at times comes close to the tone of 1066 and All That with his tales of bloodthirsty nobles and long-suffering peasants. But his strength is that, ignoring what pusillanimous academics might think, he trusts himself to have a go at reframing European history.
Despite the huge research that has gone into this book, [Winder] wears his learning lightly, and much of it written in the form of personal travel memoir, as he explores the enormous cultural riches of this place ... Winder is at his best when writing about people such as Dürer ('My favourite German'), Hieronymous Bosch, Holbein. His deep appreciation of their work allows irreverence.
Lotharingia is a hybrid of conventional history and waspish travelogue delivered at a cracking pace. Winder’s meanderings...enliven his racy narrative. They convey a real sense of place and continuity ... Purists might dismiss Winder’s work as Horrible Histories for adults. He certainly has an eye for the absurd, the stupid and the cruel. But his erudition is beyond doubt. His mission is to engage and entertain. His numerous tangents still manage to grip the reader ... Winder is fascinated by the quirks of geography, the enclaves and exclaves and micro-kingdoms of Lotharingia. This is a quirky book. But it is also an intelligent treatment of the vanities of (mostly) men and a thousand years of often pointless bloodshed.
[Winder] likes to present himself as a world-class bore...but he is deeply read and endlessly curious, a man with the enviable ability to make one share his obsessions ... He makes no claim to originality, but it doesn’t matter—that’s not why one reads him. No professional historian would dare begin a section by announcing that 'ever since I can remember I have hated Louis XIV' ...Such claims are an amateur’s privilege, amateur in the old sense of the word: someone who pursues his subject for the sake of love alone and is therefore free to indulge his idiosyncrasies and passions. In that, Lotharingia seems less successful than Germania precisely because it’s got less of Mr. Winder himself; the book is determined instead to tell its 1,000-year story, in which there’s always another war or reign to get through. Still, at his best Mr. Winder makes me laugh aloud, and anyone who grew up with Monty Python will feel at home in his pages.
[Winder] brings his subject to life with sympathy, verve, and erudition ... Winder highlights the contrasts between readers’ modern perspectives and those of the Lotharingians and their peers with a deft combination of personal observation, historical anecdotes, and humorously straightforward summaries of complex military, dynastic, and ideological conflicts. This work is highly recommended for fans of European and world history.
...the author brings the material rivetingly alive with the sheer elasticity of his imagination and prose ... Throughout, Winder infuses his account with such energy and wit that readers may be pleasantly unaware of the many history lessons he imparts. A meandering and highly entertaining amble through fascinating bits of history that culminates in the horrors of the invading armies of the world wars.
[Winder] leads an informative, often funny, but overly long tour of part of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire ... Readers may wish Winder’s editors had insisted on excising some minutiae, but they will both learn from and be entertained by this enthusiastic, outside-the-box European history.
