A description of a huge, lumbering imperial frame, this referring to Tsar Nicholas I who succeeded his brother Alexander.

‘Though his heavy bones resembled scrap iron in a potato sack, he was handsome.’

From the first and best volume of a trilogy of novels by the Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy, covering the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the eve of the First World War in 1914.

Source: Lajos Zilahy, Century in Scarlet (London: Prion, 2001), p. 99

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