As he later wrote in his autobiography: I wanted to be writing something and decided that I could carry on my diplomatic history from the point where the Struggle for Mastery left off.

I had, I thought, done most of the research work needed by reviewing the various books of memoirs and the volumes of German and British diplomatic documents as they came out.

[2] However, according to Kathleen Burk's biography of Taylor, he did not read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf until after writing the book.

[5][6] Taylor broke with this consensus and the five main themes of his book are: first, that foreign policy is determined by reasons of state and the necessity of reacting to foreign threats, rather than driven by internal politics such as economic or ideological factors; second, that Hitler possessed strategic goals but no thought-out grand scheme as to how and when these goals would be achieved; third, that Hitler's goals were the same as those of other German politicians such as Gustav Stresemann; fourth, that Hitler was an opportunist, taking advantage of events provided by the French and British governments, rather than working according to a timetable; and, fifth, that in destroying the Treaty of Versailles and invading Poland, Hitler had the support of the German people.

[5] Translations also appeared in French, Italian, Finnish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Sinhalese.

[8] In the review from the New Statesman, David Marquand praised Taylor as "the only English historian now writing who can bend the bow of Gibbon and Macaulay".

[10]On 9 July, Taylor and Trevor-Roper appeared in a televised debate, chaired by Robert Kee, in which the two historians quarrelled.

Mason pointed to Nazi Germany's "demonic urge" and criticised Taylor for dismissing German economic patterns, such as the importance of rearmament and the objective of achieving autarky.

[13] Taylor responded in the April 1965 issue of Past and Present: "The evidence for economic or political crises within Germany between 1937 and 1939 is very slight, if non-existent.

Of course there was a general climate of feeling in the Europe of the nineteen-thirties which made war likely...Of course historians must explore the profound forces.

[16] The historian Elizabeth Wiskemann wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement, quoting the many favourable reviews of Taylor's book in neo-Nazi publications.

When Taylor flew to Munich for a televised debate with a Swiss historian, the taxi driver who drove him from the airport asked him whether he knew an Englishman called A.J.P.

At the publisher's suggestion, Taylor wrote a preface to the American edition explaining America's role in the 1930s.

[19] Two exceptions were American revisionist historians Harry Elmer Barnes[20] and Murray Rothbard,[21] who both praised Taylor's thesis in the hopes that it would allow future scholars to correct the historical record of the outbreak of hostilities, in a similar manner that occurred after the First World War.