Lotharingia

SUCCUMBED to temptation and bought in hardback Lotharingia - A Personal History Of Europe's Lost Country, the latest book from travel historian Simon Winder.
By "travel historian" I mean someone who goes through areas, visits points of interest and recounts their past.
His previous two books in this genre, Danubia and Germania, have pretty much self-explanatory titles.
Lotharingia is named after the middle portion of the Emperor Charlemagne's domains, and was somewhat squeezed between East and West Francia, whose borders are recognisable today as the cores of modern Germany and France.
Lotharingia as a single realm was short-lived, but Winder's book at some 500 pages is not a short read.

Lotharingia … short in life, long in the retelling

That should be all to the good if it is up to the standards of Danubia and Germania.
I know one should not judge a book by its cover, but the jacket illustration by Berlin-based Martin Haake did nothing to put me off making a purchase.