Paul Britten Austin (5 April 1922 – 25 July 2005[1]) was an English author, translator, broadcaster, administrator, and scholar of Swedish literature.

It describes the life and times of Sweden's bard, the eighteenth century singer and poet Carl Michael Bellman.

A genre which "had no model and can have no successors" (Kellgren), these songs were to grow swiftly in number until they made up the great work on which Bellman's reputation as a poet chiefly rests.He called them Fredman's Epistles.To understand the title it is necessary to go back twenty years.

In the seventeen forties, when Carl Michael was growing up in the Lilla Daurerska Huset, the man who had been responsible for seeing to it that the finest clocks of court and city kept time was Jean Fredman—he with the penchant for wigs, lavender water and other Frenchified refinements...In the foreword to his life of Bellman, Britten Austin explains: "This book was born on the spur of a moment – the moment when I realised that .. there is not, and apparently never has been, a book on Bellman in English.

Verse translation into the original metre is necessary, he argues, "because the virtuosity of Bellman's verse-structures, wedding his poems to their melodies, is itself the source of much of their dramatic effect."

Britten Austin saw Bellman as an "infinitely loveable and brilliant genius of the Rococo, whose earthy humanity, not unlike Burns', blends so exquisitely with the graces of his artificial age.

[7] Alongside his career and his other writings, Britten Austin spent 25 years working on his detailed three-volume eyewitness-only account of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.

"[8] To achieve this "Naturally I have had to take my thousands of vivid fragments, longer or shorter, snip them and put them together in what I came to think of as a 'marching order', and generally help the reader not to go astray.

[9] Reviewing the book in the RUSI Journal, the military historian Charles Esdaile[10] described it as "vivid and compelling...The most detailed account of the disaster yet to become available in English.